The Theater is a Temple...

This spring Paper Mill Playhouse is performing my favorite Stephen Sondheim show, the musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Forum is an absolute delight of a show, about a Roman slave who's trying to win his freedom by securing a beautiful virgin for his young master.  Having performed the show twice (a courtesan in high school, Philia in another production), the setting indicated in the libretto made me giggle when I first read it:  200 years before the birth of Christ, a day in spring.  So this would be right after the Second Punic War, when Rome was really the only player left in the Western Mediterranean after having crushed their primary rival, Carthage. 

I studied Roman History last spring and was fascinated by the Second Punic War—this was the one with Hannibal and the elephants.  To sum up (briefly—there were three Punic wars altogether), Carthage was a seafaring city on the northern coast of Africa (in today’s Tunisia) and Rome’s main rival in the western Mediterranean.  Carthage had had its Phoenician ass handed to it by Rome in the First Punic War, 264-241 BC, and was jonesin’ for revenge.  The First War was essentially expansionist and basically unremarkable except for the fact that Rome developed a navy from scratch—yes, notwithstanding Italy’s manymany miles of coastline, Rome (which pretty much controlled the entire peninsula by then) did not have a navy until 261 BC!    Along comes Hannibal, one of the greatest generals in history—he invades Rome via an overland through through the Alps with elephants.

And then proceeds to inflict many, many terrible defeats on the Romans—the site of one especially bitter loss, Lake Trasimene, wallows in the gore with place names like Ossaia (Place of Bones) and Caporosso (Cape Red--as in blood).  

O hai there! One of Hannibal's Gallic allies beheading the Roman general Flaminius.
The Celts were the *scourge* of ancient Rome until Julius Caesar came along--they were the only people who managed to sack Rome until the very end, when the Vandals came in.

Eventually of course the Romans manage to turn the tables and ultimately eliminate their rival--and now that Rome is so dominant, it can relax a little and start to think about non-military concerns.  A Roman cultural and artistic voice begins to emerge—which leads us to Forum.

Forum is based on the plays of Plautus, a Roman playwright who lived roughly 254 BC – 184 BC—so, right around the time the musical is set.  In addition to being the first extant Latin playwright, Plautus was known for his use of stock characters—the scheming servant, the military braggart, the overbearing lady of the house—and these characters populate Forum as well, helpfully cueing the audience with their names:

• Philia = young female love interest
• Pseudolus = con artist
• Hero = …well, the hero!

Of course these archetypes continued on through the middle ages and beyond—commedia dell'arte, Restoration comedies and 20th century musical theater all make use of these same types. In fact farce depends on these kinds of shortcuts--the quicker it can establish the relationship, the quicker the payoff.


Forum's libretto is sprinkled with references to the city's geography and the cultures and civilizations that surround it.  One song, "Pretty Little Picture," begins 


♫ In the Tiber there sits a boat... ♫

The old, old Tiber, seen from the Ponte* Principe Amedeo Savoia-Aosta.
Philia would've sailed up this river when arriving from her home in Crete.

The Funeral sequence is filled with geographical references--in fact a dedicated musical scholar could virtually map out the Mediterranean world through this song alone!


♫ All Crete was at her feet
All Thrace was in her thrall
All Sparta loved her sweetness
And Gall
And Spain ♫


Musical theater--bridging the ancient and the modern worlds!  Plautus would have been so proud...

*Fun Fact--Ponte (bridge) and pontiff share the same root word for a reason--the term predates Christianity and derives from the Collegium Pontificum, the body of Roman priests whose duties included placating the river gods.