A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Credibility

Talk about quick response time: The dust hasn’t even settled yet from the historic collapse of the Iron Curtain, and already the impresarios of Southland culture have come up with a ringing theatrical salute to the citizens of Eastern Europe, who at last are throwing off the yoke of Communist oppression.

In just a matter of months, the Orange County Performing Arts Center, in a new joint venture with the La Jolla Playhouse, is going to serve up that stirring tribute to the hard-won victories of freedom fighters everywhere:

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

You’re wondering what a bawdy 1962 musical comedy, about a eunuch slave who runs around ancient Rome in a toga making lots of sex jokes, has to do with the bloody price that tyrannized people around the world have paid to topple brutal, authoritarian regimes?

Well, hear the words spoken earlier this week by La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, in announcing this heroic partnership with the Center, itself (the partnership, not the Center) a shining example in the time-honored American tenet of freedom and cooperation among all peoples.

“Like all great comedies,” McAnuff said, “this one has a serious idea at its core: freedom. This is a moment when freedom is on the minds of most people in this world, and it’s one of the great issues of our time. This musical celebrates freedom, and I can’t wait to get to it.”

In other words: Nelson Mandela, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

I, for one, can’t wait to see it--again. Even if it has been done on Broadway. And off-Broadway. And as a movie. And in revivals. And summer stock, and dinner theaters, and community theaters and community colleges.

The preponderence of productions of this particular musical, to say the least, raises the challenge of finding a fresh approach. Which sounds exactly like what McAnuff et al. have in mind.

“We’re always interested in exploring new forms and genres at the playhouse,” McAnuff said, “and classic American musical comedy is, in fact, a new genre for us.”

Everything old is new again?

Still, there are possibilities. This time around, they could look outside of Broadway or Hollywood for real-world figures to add a bit of contemporary relevance (not to imply that this masterwork ode to freedom needs such help). Too bad they can’t cast deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu as Senex, the sex-crazy slave master who sends his wily but browbeaten house-servant Pseudolus through one comic misadventure after another in search of the courtesan he desperately desires. But at last report, Ceausescu was missing and presumed seriously dead.

Hey--now that Ronald Reagan’s not so busy with foreign invasions, line-item vetoes and other great performances, maybe he can get a part in this “Forum.” It’d be a brilliant casting move, here in the heart of Reagan Country, and he’d be one more celebrity (along with Mitzi Gaynor and Vic Damone and Tom Bosley) that those benevolent folks at the Center, in the finest tradition of the GOP, would be keeping off the Social Security roles.

This isn’t, by the way, a first. Cal State Fullerton’s drama department attempted to ride the coattails of the revolution in Eastern Europe a couple of months ago when it staged “Largo Desolato” by Vaclav Havel, the playwright who was elected president of Czechoslovakia after last year’s popular uprising.

That production played to just a few hundred people, though, and actually was kind of a downer story about patients in a state-run mental hospital in an unspecified Communist country.

To my knowledge, it didn’t have one hit song in it.

But I digress.

Believe it or not, the chance to present this paean to liberty, honorable as it is, is only half the motivation behind this unique partnership. (“This bond we’re forging with the Center is the wave of the future,” McAnuff said.)

You see, the Center wants to be known as more than just a fancy hall where touring groups and musicals and Elvis impersonators stop for a day or a week. Center officials yearn to carve out their own place in the annals of contemporary culture. That’s why they’ve set aside a half-million free-enterprise dollars, unhampered by repressive governments, in a fund established specifically to pay for musical theater or dance productions. And that’s why they hooked up with the critically admired but financially strapped La Jolla folks.

“The La Jolla Playhouse is a highly regarded resident theater company that is known internationally for its dynamic programming and artistic excellence,” Center president Thomas R. Kendrick said. “With this partnership, both the Center and the La Jolla Playhouse can vigorously pursue a fresh, creative approach to a fine example of American musical theater--while prudently sharing the substantial risks and costs that typically come with such ventures.”

So let’s see . . . in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a slave vigorously pursues his dream (personal freedom) by trying to find, at substantial risk and cost, a fine example of a courtesan who will prudently share her fresh, creative approach with his lascivious owner. The Center and the La Jolla Playhouse strive to realize their dreams (artistic credibility and financial stability, respectively) with a musical about a slave who pimps for his master.

It’s a match made in Vaudeville.

C’mon folks--this is the best you could come up with? This is the best Orange County deserves? Estimates suggest that each partner may shell out a quarter of a million dollars to resurrect “Forum” one more time. Sure it’s got some yuks, and a couple of hummable Stephen Sondheim tunes, but this is the big pitch for cultural immortality?

The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles bolstered its considerable reputation by bringing Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company to the Southland earlier this year for new productions of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “King Lear.” Closer to home, South Coast Repertory has won national recognition with its Tony Award as best resident theater, for mounting continually innovative productions of new and old theatrical works of merit.

The Center itself racked up a few artistic brownie points during American Ballet Theatre’s recent stint by including Twyla Tharp’s dazzling new ballet, “Brief Fling,” for local audiences.

But “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a call from the Nobel Prize nominating committee, guys.

With any luck, maybe the People’s Choice Awards will give you a jingle.

Come clean. If you want to do a lowbrow comedy full of raunchy humor and slapstick gags, and sell a few tickets in the process, be straight about it. Save us the allusions to greatness. Sing along, now: “Significance tomorrow--comedy tonight!”