THEATER REVIEW : He’s a Slave to Comedy

They might as well just paste Nathan Lane’s mug on that classical comedy mask. He is one of the finest comic actors alive and it is right and fitting that he has taken the mantel from Zero Mostel to play Pseudolus, the put-upon Roman slave who yearns for freedom, in the new Broadway revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Pseudolus is the heart, bones and marrow of the 1962 show, which--joke for joke--boasts the funniest book in all of musical comedy. It opened Thursday night at the St. James Theatre.

Unfortunately, director Jerry Zaks has not assembled a cast as comically sure-handed as his star. The supporting cast ranges from good to acceptable to bad, too often expending more energy than it gets back in laughs.

In order to earn his freedom, Pseudolus must set in motion a gaggle of schemes, involving multiple misunderstandings, mistaken virgins, swapped potions and a staggering font of lies and counter-lies. A protean juggler of facts and faces, Pseudolus always stays one tiny step ahead of the chariot wheel. His brain is whirling so fast that everyone else seems like an idiot to him. With eyebrows that stand straight up on his forehead like exclamations, Lane assumes a tireless series of masks--impatience, disbelief, outrage--that is a great comic parade by itself.

As Hysterium, the chronically nervous head slave, Mark Linn-Baker is a big wet noodle through the first act. He does score, though, in the second-act reprise of “Lovely.” Disguised as the missing virgin, and not happy about it, he melts when Pseudolus convinces him in song that he is in fact lovely (he actually looks worse in drag than Lane did in the current film hit “The Birdcage”).

Chris Groenendaal as the vainglorious warrior Miles Gloriosus is simply not funny. The three proteans (Brad Aspel, Cory English, Ray Roderick), who are supposed to be comedy personified, also are not funny at all; they are like a wan imitation of Robin Williams, in triplicate.

As the brothel owner Lycus, the rotund Ernie Sabella (Pseudolus in the 1990 La Jolla Playhouse version), is a vast visual joke with the funniest wig in the show. As Senex, the leering head of the house, Lewis J. Stadlen is good but would have been funnier without the amateurish Pappy Yokum makeup. As his scary wife, Domina, Mary Testa has a lot of bite, but her song “That Dirty Old Man,” the only dud in the show, is a one-joke snoozer.

“Forum” has the distinction of being the first Broadway show to have both music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and it is his lightest, most charming score. “Comedy Tonight,” the number that famously saved the show when it was added out of town, is a brilliant opening, surviving even a too-frantic staging that hints right away the director does not have complete confidence in the show’s ability to sustain its manic edge all the way through. On other numbers, like Gloriosus’ “Bring Me My Bride,” Zaks and Marshall even step on some of the best jokes, as the annoying proteans once again grab the spotlight and fall flat.

Choreographer Rob Marshall has the hardest job in the show. He stages the Act 1 number in which six gorgeous courtesans display their bodies for a shattered Pseudolus. Of all the jokes in the play, only the ones involving older men leering over leggy young things carry a tinge of unpleasantness. This leaves Marshall the problem of presenting almost-naked chorus girls selling their wares and still somehow showing us that he knows that the etiquette of even sexist jokes has changed in the last 34 years. (As Philea, the virgin, Jessica Boevers manages this commentary while singing a song about how pretty and unbelievably stupid she is.) But of the six dancing courtesans, only one steps out of the Bond-girl era and seems to own her sexuality, and that is Gymnasia (Stephanie Pope), the last. And that’s because she’s a dominatrix and she doesn’t jiggle.

It would be foolish, though, to let the show’s pre-feminist humor destroy the pleasure of this shapely comedy. Paying tribute to Plautus, the Roman comic playwright of the 3rd century BC, book-writers Bert Shevelove and Larry Gelbart rolled 2,000 years of comedy into a stream of seamless jokes, and not one of them a dud. What a well-built, durable thing the book is. Some of the jokes can only be savored in context, such as when several nervous characters have trouble saying the words, “Who seeks the house of Marcus Lycus?” Others, such as when Pseudolus eyes a bottle of wine and wonders aloud, “Was 1 a good year?,” are delicious all by themselves.

It all boils down to Plautus, and the roots of comedy as we know it. When Lane first enters in his silly toga and laurel wreath, hit by the footlights, tripping and making faces, you realize how simple and recyclable it all is--that this is what has been making people laugh, in different forms, since the first time people came together and laughed.

The audience welcomed Lane, their prodigal son, with thunderous applause. Ironically, he returns to the Broadway stage a bigger star than ever because of “Birdcage,” in which he give ones of his worst performances, playing a bratty drag queen who is a kind of homosexual Stepin Fetchit. No matter. With “Forum,” Lane proves again he is the current keeper of the flame of a tradition that’s as vitally important as any human beings have come up with since the beginning of time.

* “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St., New York. (800) 432-7250.