"Comedy tonight!"
That happy message is sung by the cast as the curtain goes up on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Comedy is more than welcome in unhappy times, and Stephen Sondheim's 1962 musical, set in ancient Rome, offers plenty of it. A production of the show by the Student Arts Collective at Howard Community College can be seen through Dec. 14.
Sondheim first became known for the lyrics he supplied for West Side Story and Gypsy. A Funny Thing was his first Broadway show as composer and lyricist.
The book, by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, tells of a young Roman, appropriately named Hero, who falls in love with Philia, a courtesan. She has been sold to a famous soldier who is coming that day to claim her.
As this suggests, the show, written 46 years ago, includes a great deal of humor that some people today might consider politically incorrect. At Howard Community College, however, the opening-night audience greeted the authors' jokes and situations with generous laughter.
Philia loves Hero, too, and Hero's clever slave Pseudolus says he will bring the couple together if Hero will reward him by setting him free. After coping successfully with many agonizing and frustrating turns of plot, capped by a chaotic, chase-filled climax, Pseudolus achieves both goals.
In writing the show, Shevelove and Gelbart studied the comedies of Plautus, a Roman playwright who lived more than 2,000 years ago (and whose play Menaechmi gave Shakespeare the idea for The Comedy of Errors). Thus inspired, they came up with a hilarious mixture of burlesque and farce, laced with clever and suggestive dialogue.
The script makes good use of stock characters from the Roman theater who have been turning up in comedies ever since: the bossy wife, the put-upon husband, the innocent youth, the beautiful but dumb ingenue, the boastful soldier, the servant who is smarter than his or her master.
The characters bear a mixture of real Roman names (Hero, Senex) and invented ones (Erronius, Hysterium). Some names were taken from plays by Plautus: Pseudolus, the crafty slave; Miles Gloriosus, the bragging warrior.
When inventing names for the courtesans, Shevelove and Gelbart let themselves go: Tintinabula, Vibrata, Panacea and Gymnasia.
Pseudolus, never at a loss for a way out of a tricky situation, is a plum role for any comic actor. Darius McKeiver, who obviously loves being on stage, plays it with campy confidence.
