A TRULY FUNNY THING : Costa Mesa Now Has a ‘Forum’ for Witty Lowbrow Entertainment

The overriding virtue of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” opening Friday, Aug. 17, at the Orange County Perfoming Arts Center, is director Des McAnuff’s regard for the dignity of comedy.

“Forum,” which is coming to Costa Mesa in a co-presentation with the La Jolla Playhouse (where it just concluded a successful run), shows McAnuff’s respect for the material. He has a field day clowning it up-- up , mind you, not down. Wayne Cilento’s choreography is never cheap; suggestive, yes, in bad taste, no.

There’s not a smidgen of vulgarity in this show, which has a splendid pit band of 14 that keeps things at a frenzied pitch.

It’s Entertainment with a capital E, not a capital H, as in high-brow, which “Forum” could/should never be.

McAnuff, 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. “The House of Marcus Lycus” is back to its original length, and the exquisite love duet, “The Echo Song,” uncharitably excised in the past, is happily back where it belongs.

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 machinations of the slave Pseudolus to attain freedom) or altering the sexist-chauvinist jokes and stereotypes (the harridan Domina, the henpecked 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.

This “Forum” moves like the wind, part Barnum & Bailey, part Abbott and Costello, and is redolent with sight gags, word gags (“Oh, Philia . . .”), chases, revolving houses that make comic statements of their own--everything, in fact, except the kind of Las Vegas sleaze that has beset this appealing musical through the years, too often making it just appalling.

What

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

When

Friday, Aug. 17, through Sunday, Aug. 26.

Where

Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts

One block east of South Coast Plaza shopping center.

Wherewithal

$16 to $38.

Where to call

(714) 556-2787.