CAPSULE REVIEW : ‘90s ‘Forum’: Vibrant, Unclean, Saucy

A funny thing happened on the way to the La Jolla Playhouse: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” became high-class entertainment. That’s Entertainment with a capital E, not a capital H, as in high-brow, which “Forum” could/should never be.

It simply means that director Des McAnuff, choreographer Wayne Cilento and designers John Arnone (playful sets), Brenda Berry (jocular lights) and Susan Hilferty (tongue-in-cheek costumes) have taken the 1962 Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart book based on those immortal low-brow Roman gags of Plautus and added new fun and visual wit of their own.

They didn’t have to do anything to the gorgeous Stephen Sondheim music or lyrics (how do you improve on “I squeak, I squawk/Today I woke too weak to walk. . . .”?) except restore a couple of hitherto deleted songs.

Orchestrator Bruce Coughlin has spiced things up with some embellishments a la Spike Jones, and musical director Ted Sperling and Steven A. Freeman have injected some strategic but noninvasive incidental music. All to the good.

The results are a truly funny thing: a vivid, fast-moving, new-vision “Forum” for the ‘90s.

McAnuff has called it a New Vaudeville “Forum,” but never mind the semantics. What it comes down to is that, without hampering the old plot (the oldest of them all: the convoluted machinations of the slave Pseudolus to attain his freedom) or altering any of the sexist-chauvinist jokes and stereotypes (the harridan Domina, the hen-pecked Senex, the bevy of courtesans with such indiscreet names as Vibrata, Gymnasia and Panacea), McAnuff has breathed robust new life into them.

He’s given the women equal smarts, made them undiminished rebels instead of bimbo chattel, placed the show’s emphasis squarely on everyone’s unquenchable thirst for freedom (from slavery, from marriage, from parents, from contracts) and let it rip.

The overriding virtue of this co-presentation with the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts (where the show will play Aug. 17-21) is the director’s regard for the dignity of comedy. McAnuff has respect for the material and a field day clowning it up.

It’s a vibrant, unclean, saucy romp, filled with cleverness and wit, in which all elements come together to make it the summer’s great Roman caper. Something for everyone. They don’t make them much more entertaining than that.

A complete review runs in Tuesday’s Calendar section.