A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum

Book by Shevelove and Gelbart
Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Based on the plays of Plautus (who still deserves a credit line...!)

Directed by
Guy Saunders

Thanks to the Minack Theatre
for all the photographs on this page

The Tower Theatre performing at the Minack Theatre, Cornwall

Musical in Fine Forum
Review by Frank Ruhrmund from "The Cornishman"

Friends, Romans, countrymen, residents and visitors to Cornwall alike, lend me your ears, I come not to bury the London-based Tavistock Repertory Company's presentation of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but to praise it - to help Matthew Grocutt blow the trumpet in the company's band and herald the fact that the gods of comedy are smiling on this production. The show is sold out but, if you haven't been lucky enough to get a ticket and love laughing, then keep ringing the Minack's box office for returns.

First performed on Broadway on my birthday, in the early 1960s, a starring vehicle for Frankie Howard a year later in the West End, somewhat surprisingly, it has stood the test of time well for it is a rare musical - and Sondheim fans will not thank me for this - in which its book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with a little help from Plautus, is stronger than its music.
Set in pre-Christian Rome, its plot revolves around the simple formula, a slave gets his freedom if his master gets the girl, while it may be one of the bawdiest of musicals it is also one of the funniest. Director Guy Saunders lives up to the promise of the show's superb opening number "Comedy Tonight" and provides "Something for everyone" and, indeed, employs just about every device in the business in his desire, and his effort, to divert.

Wisely, he restrains his cast of campers from pitching their tents regardless, and the show is all the better for it. Led from the front by Daniel Watson as Pseudolus, "Lovely is the the one thing I can do", a likeable freedom-loving slave who, thankfully, owes nothing to Frankie Howard, they are all in fine form, or forum. Frank Crocker as Hysterium, "A man born to grovel", steals every tent peg and scene there is : praise, too, for all the nobles in this raunchy Roman romp, the MG-powered Proteans and the dancing courtesans, not forgetting the Geminae - Niagara and Viagra - but I musn't give too much away.

A "Carry On" Plautine pantomime, from its several snappy one-liners to its running, or rather rambling, gag of the wandering Erronius, winningly played by Henry Chester, I enjoyed every witty and wacky second of it. Amidst the laughter, like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, to borrow from the Bard, I could only gasp, a plague on all three of your houses, Erronius, Lycus and Senex, you've made worms' meat of me!