'Forum' feels a little too ancient
A funny thing has happened to "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum": It's not so funny anymore.
Oh, sure, the slapstick still works, and the central character of Pseudolus, the freedom-seeking slave, is as ingratiatingly self-serving and amusingly cynical as ever. But there are surprising lulls and dead spots in this 1962 musical, whole sections where you just want them to get on with it already. And the young Stephen Sondheim's score, outside of the classic "Comedy Tonight" and a couple of other songs, just isn't strong enough to patch the holes.
That's the impression, at least, from the pared-down production that Boston Theatre Works is presenting at the Boston Center for the Arts. Director Erick Devine and choreographer Ilyse Robbins keep the small cast running around Jenna McFarland Lord's minimalist set - three doors, one per house on the ancient Roman street where the shenanigans unfold. And music director Joshua Finstein makes the most of Nathan Leigh's clever arrangements for his tiny onstage band (and the occasional triangle-striking or drum-beating actor for percussion). For all the activity, though, there just isn't a sustained energy to the goings-on.
Partly it's a question of tone. Clearly, the attitudes and assumptions of the musical's book, by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, needed some dusting off to play to a contemporary audience. Its women have two choices - bimbo or shrew - and its men are either henpecked, clueless, or unsexed. All of which can be just hilarious, no doubt, but the problem here is that the production sometimes camps up these attitudes and sometimes plays them straight.
That leaves the audience wondering how to laugh: Are we supposed to share the amusement of the show's creators at their naive stereotypes, or should we adopt the posture of wised-up irony that the cast sometimes affects? If you can't land firmly in one camp or the other, you end up in neither.
Bill Gardiner mostly escapes this dilemma, because his role as the narrating Pseudolus gives him a natural detachment from the action. And he displays an easy comic style in his songs and in his banter with rival slave Hysterium - whose personification by Neil A. Casey is, at its best moments, truly hysterical. Like the rest of the cast, though, they sometimes seem to have been directed to play the comedy as broadly as possible, which leads to more mugging and heavy-handedness than this brittle comic artifact can bear.
Kimmerie H.O. Jones's clever costumes hint at what may be the half-realized intention behind all the shifts in tone. She gives the slaves togas, but accessorizes with fanny packs and sneakers, and other characters sport similarly anachronistic jewelry and footwear.
There's an interesting idea here - keep jarring us into the present to make us notice the artifice of both past and present notions of the distant past - but it never quite comes into focus. We're not in ancient Rome; we're not in 1962; we're not quite in the present, either. And, wherever we are, we're just not laughing hard enough to make it worth the trip.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
