A FITFULLY AMUSING THING HAPPENED
ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM IN SKOKIE

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a glorious farce, a 20th-century construction based on the characters and situations from the works of the old Roman playwright Plautus. The book is by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (who also created a little-known TV show called M*A*S*H), and the score by the great Stephen Sondheim—the first time he was handed the reins to compose both music and words for a musical (he had only written lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy). Farce is one of the most deceptively difficult forms of comedy to get right; A Funny Thing ups that difficulty to astronomical levels, thanks to the joke-dense script, frenetic action, and Sondheim’s wonderful music, with its characteristically tricky rhymes, key shifts, and tonal changes.

MadKap Productions’ staging of A Funny Thing opens their eleventh season at The Skokie Theatre, a charming 113-yr-old movie theatre reconfigured as a performing arts space. It’s a bold choice for a small company—an intricate farce with vocal demands to match—and while the results are mixed, the laughs come fast and often enough to remind us why this 1962 show remains a classic.

The plot remains as labyrinthine as ever: Pseudolous, a cunning Plautine slave whose machinations drive the story, contrives an intricate plot to enable his master, Hero, to run away with Philia, a new courtesan (and a virgin to boot) at the House of Lycus, a local den of ill-repute next door. The only problem is that Philia has already been purchased by Miles Gloriosus, a captain of war, who is on his way to Rome to collect his courtesan/bride-to-be. Pseudolous’s reluctant partner-in-crime is the aptly-named Hysterium, the slave-in-chief.

There’s Erronius, played by Gale Starr in a bit of gender-blind casting, who is searching for her lost children, stolen in infancy by pirates. There are Hero’s parents, Senex and Domina: he’s a randy old philandering goat, she’s a domineering shrew. Scattered in the mix are a cavalcade of terpsichorean courtesans and three Proteans (Aidan and Owen Espinosa and Mitchell Shaw),who double as eunuchs and soldiers.

Director Wayne Mell keeps things moving at a zippy pace for the most part but there are a few momentum-killing scenes, especially in the action-heavy second act. An interminable chase sequence between the Proteans and other characters almost shuts the entire show down. Amusing at first, it gets less so with each repetition until it is completely mirth-free.

These issues can be corrected. The bigger problem is that the proficiency of the individual cast members is so wildly disparate that it disrupts the comic timing. As Pseudolous, Ed Rutherford gives a fine performance as the smartest character on stage. His scenes with Andrew Buel as Hysterium and Daniel Leahy as Marcus Lycus, the dealer in Courtesans, are the funniest and sharpest scenes of the night. Mr. Leahy, in particular, is the most natural farceur on stage and I wish we could have seen more of him.

When it comes to the songs, things get even more imbalanced. With the exception of the outstanding “Comedy Tonight,” one of my favorite opening numbers ever, the songs are minor Sondheim, provided more as respites from the jokes than to drive the action forward. But even minor Sondheim has many pleasures, and even minor Sondheim is difficult to sing, and the quality of singing is all over the map here. The three MVPs mentioned above maintain their status (“Everybody Ought to Have a Maid”) but the rest of the cast is a mixed bag: Erin Renee Baumrucker is hilarious as Domina when she speaks, but distressing on “That Dirty Old Man”; Emily Lewis doesn’t really show as the goods as Philia with “That’ll Show Him”; Max Perkel is audibly shaky on his lower register for Miles Gloriosus, although he nicely compensates by dialing up the bombast and volume on the higher notes to hilarious effect—and gets away with it; and “Impossible”—a silly and charming number that I’ve always thought of as a practice run for A Little Night Music’s “It Would Have Been Wonderful”—falls flat, with Mark Anderson (Senex) and Tyler Lord (Hero) out of sync with each other.

It’s still funny. I laughed. I laughed a lot. It’s hard not to laugh at this bawdy exemplar of Low Comedy. The book has so many jokes that even if some of them don’t land (I’d estimate about 20% didn’t here), you can still have a good time, and I did, for the most part.

But farce demands impeccable timing, split-second entrances and exits, razor-sharp pacing, and a cast with the stamina and agility of trapeze artists. Unlike more grounded comedies, farce thrives on escalating chaos—misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and doors slamming just as someone else walks in. Every beat has to land precisely; one missed cue or sagging transition can make the whole soufflé collapse. It’s no wonder even seasoned companies find it a challenge to stage Forum. So perhaps the real surprise is not that some of it missed—but that so much of it hit as well as it did.

photos courtesy of the company

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
MadKap Productions
Skokie Theatre, 7924 N. Lincoln Avenue in Skokie
Fri and Sat at 7:30; Sun at 2; Wed at 1:30 (July 30)
ends on August 3, 2025
for tickets ($42-$48), call 847.677,7761 or visit Skokie Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago