THE APPLAUSE MUSICAL LIBRARY
A CHORUS LINE: The Book of the Musical
Michael Bennett, James Kirkwood, Nicholas Dante and Edward Kleban
CITY OF ANGELS
Larry Gelbart, Cy Coleman and David Zippel
THE FANTASTICKS
Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart
THE GREAT MOVIE MUSICAL TRIVIA BOOK
Jeff Kurtti
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by Hugh Wheeler
THE LONGEST LINE
Broadway’s Most Singular Sensation: A Chorus Line
Gary Stevens and Alan George
THE MUSICAL: A Look at the American Musical Theater
Richard Kislan
THE NEW YORK MUSICALS OF COMDEN & GREEN
On the Town Wonderful Town Bells are Ringing
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by James Lapine
SWEENEY TODD, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by Hugh Wheeler
TITANIC: The Complete Book of the Musical
Story and book by Peter Stone Lyrics by Maury Yeston
Four by Sondheim, Wheeler, Lapine, Shevelove and Gelbart
An anthology of musicals als published in individual volumes by Applause.
Copyright © 2000 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
“A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM” Introduction Copyright © 1991 by Applause Theatre Book Publishers. Copyright © 1963 by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart and Stephen Sondheim. Lyrics from musical compositions (except “The House of Marcus Lycus”), Copyright © 1962 by Stephen Sondheim. “The House of Marcus Lycus,” Copyright © 1963 by Stephen Sondheim. Burthen Music Company, Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. Lyrics used herein by permission of Burthen Music Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
“A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC” Introduction Copyright © 1991 by Jonathan Tunick. Copyright © 1973 by Hugh Wheeler, Stephen Sondheim and Harold S. Prince. Music and lyrics Copyright © 1973 by Revelation Music Publishing Corp./Beautiful Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
“SWEENEY TODD, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Introduction © 1991 by Applause Theatre Book Publishers. Libretto Copyright © 1979 by Hugh Wheeler. Music and Lyrics Copyright © 1978, 1979 by Revelation Music Publishing Corp. and Rilting Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
“SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE” Introduction Copyright © 1991 by Applause Theatre Book Publishers. Book Copyright © 1984 by James Lapine. Music and Lyrics Copyright © 1984 by Stephen Sondheim, Revelation Music Publishing Corp. and Rilting Music, Inc. All rights reserved.
CAUTION. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that each play within is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage performing, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.
All inquiries concerning stock, amateur, second-class touring and foreign language stage performing rights should be directed to Music Theatre International, 545 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Inquiries concerning all other rights for “A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM” should be addressed to Sarah Douglas, c/o Flora Roberts, Inc., 157 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; for
“A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC,” “SWEENEY TODD, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” and “SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE” to Ms Douglas and to William Morris Agency, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to include their photographs and scene and costume designs: Van Williams, Zoe Dominic Photography, MGM/UA Communications Co., Center Theater Group of the Music Center of Los Angeles, Tony Walton, Concorde-New Horizons Corp./Wein Film Gmbh/Polygram Pictures, Martha Swope Associates/Carol Rosegg, Boris Aronson, Florence Klotz, Michael Anania, Lindsay W. Davis, Eugene Lee, Frannie Lee, Tony Straiges, Patricia Zipprodt and Ann Hould-Ward.
Drawings by Hirschfeld Copyright © 1962, 1971, 1973, 1979, 1984, 1989 by Al Hirschfeld and reproduced by special arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Card Number: 00-100279
British Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Table of Contents
Act I
Act II
Additional Lyrics
“Invocation” And “Love Is In The Air”
“Love Is In The Air”
“Farewell”
“I Do Like You”
“There’s Something About A War”
“Echo Song”
Major Productions
Selected Discography
A Litlle Night Music
Introduction
Cast Of Characters
Musical Numbers
Act I
Act II
Additional Lyrics
Major Productions
Selected Discography
Sweeney Todd
Introduction
Cast Of Characters
Musical Numbers
Prologue
Act I
Act II
Epilogue
Major Productions
Selected Discography
Sunday In The Park With George
Introduction
Cast Of Characters
Musical Numbers
Act I
Act II
Additional Lyrics
Major Productions
Musical Numbers
Selected Discography
A FVNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORVM
BASED ON THE PLAYS OF PLAUTUS
BOOK BY
BURT SHEVELOVE AND LARRY GELBART
MUSIC AND LYRICS BY
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
INTRODUCTION BY LARRY GELBART
Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford and David Burns in the original Broadway production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Larry Blyden and Phil Silvers in the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
To and From
T. M. P.
INTRODUCTION
As a rule, authors suspect the quality of any work that is written quickly and rather painlessly. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was never an object of that sort of suspicion. The only aspect of the project tha
t ever came fast and free of any pain was the dialogue. Even when we lost our way in terms of plotting, and I cannot tell you how many man-hours (women- and children-hours, as well) we spent in a wilderness of our own creation, we were never at a loss for words, funny words, mostly-funny words, or words that led up to the funny words, or funny words that paved the way for even funnier words. (Lovers of modesty will find little to their liking in this foreword, since I have absolutely none to offer when it comes to Forum. Nearly thirty years after its first performance, and having, in the intervening period, written enough words to circle the globe and the Old Globe dozens of times, it remains for me the best piece of work I’ve been lucky enough to see my name on.)
Irwin Shaw once advised all writers, in order to withstand criticism from without and compromise from within, to be vain about their work. Until A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I confess there was little I had done that warranted any sort of vanity.
The initial idea to do the show was the late Burt Shevelove’s. Burt had done an embryonic version of a Roman comedy in his university days and had long felt that a professional, full-blown Broadway production would have every chance of success.
Although Burt and I had worked together on many television shows during the 1950s, we had never functioned before as a writing team. Burt produced and directed several comedy/variety shows that I had written in that period; working in separate capacities, we learned that we laughed at the same things and, happily, always at the same time.
Our goal was to construct a musical comedy based on the style and spirit of the twenty-six surviving plays of Titus Maccius Plautus, the third-century Roman playwright, who invented all the devices of theatrical comedy, teaching amphitheater audiences up and down Caesar’s Circuit to laugh for the first time at character and situation instead of that old staple they found so amusing, bloodshed.
Certainly, there was comedy in everyday life before Plautus set quill to parchment, but it was he who created comic conventions and made use of humorous wordplay within the discipline of well-made plays.
With Stephen Sondheim as the third member of the team (it was to be the first Broadway show for which he created words and music; before Forum Steve had merely supplied the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy), we began the task of reading and dissecting the writings of and about Plautus, extracting from his works a character here, a relationship there, and then went about creating a considerable amount of new material, both dramatic and musical, as connective tissue to bond our work to his.
What a treat he was to research! How incredibly Plautus’s aged, ageless writings based on man’s gift for silliness, for pomposity and hypocrisy, have survived; how well it all stood up, the comedy that would serve as fodder not only for the theater, but for future stand-up comedians as well. Digging about as archaeologists might have, what unbelievable treasure we found in his plays, a catacomb filled with nothing but funnybones. It was as though Titus (I feel he would forgive the name-dropping) had written some great and generous last will and testament, a comic estate, and that Burt, Steve, and I had been appointed his heirs.
There they were, in the pages of Plautus, appearing for our pleasure for the first time anywhere: the brash Prologus, working very much in the manner of a modern-day master of ceremonies, addressing his remarks directly to the audience, hitting them with one-liners, warning them to sit up and pay attention and not to go to sleep during the play that was to follow. There were the sly servants, those wily slaves, scheming and plotting and outwitting everyone in sight, constantly getting the upper hand on the upper class, which was largely composed of senile skirt-chasers and henpecked husbands, very often one and the same; domineering matrons, Gorgon-like women, past their prime in every aspect of life but possessiveness; lovesick young men, so much in love they were sickening; and, of course, comely courtesans with hair and hearts of gold that you couldn’t bring home without fear of possibly offending your mother—and the certainty of arousing your father; page after page of disguise and mistaken identity, scene after scene of double takes and double meanings.
We were, of course, not Plautus’s only benefactors. From the sublime Shakespeare to the somewhat less-so sitcoms, those writers who, through the ages, have presented audiences with surrogate fools acting out their own foibles (each member of the crowd, secure in the belief that he or she is above ridicule, that it is the person in the next seat who is being so portrayed), we are all indebted to Titus Maccius Plautus, high priest of low comedy, inventor of the genre, builder of the machine on which all theater humor has run for over two millennia.
I believe it is safe to say that there is not a joke form, comic character, or farcical situation that exists today that does not find its origin in Plautus’s work. Forum contains at least one taste of his original flavor. When Miles Gloriosus, the impossibly pompous, braggart warrior, gets a huge laugh (and he always does) by stating “I am a parade!” the audience is responding to a line that is over two thousand years old.
Our goal was not to modernize the master. That is an ongoing process we preferred to leave to others. What we hoped to prove was that Plautus’s characters (always one-dimensional) and his style of plotting (which could be as complicated as a Rubik’s cube) were timeless. If the three of us occasionally resembled croquet wickets during our labors, it’s because we spent so much time bending over backward to avoid using anachronisms (one such line which we rejected, and which we related to the writers of the Forum screenplay, found its way into a scene in the movie in which Pseudolus, the leading character, wanting to know about the quality of the wine he’s being served, asks, “Was 1 a good year?”).
We were after more than purity, however. We were not simply out to prove some esoteric point that would have had an appreciative audience of three. We wanted a commercial as well as an artistic success. We were confident we could have both. Cocky would be more accurate. More than simply confidence is required to get a musical comedy on the boards. Vanity all on its own is not that much help either.
We knew that we were grounding our show in an element that had been long missing from the theater scene. Over the years, Broadway, in its development of the musical comedy had improved the quality of the former at the expense of a good deal of the latter. Musicals had come to be populated by performers who could sell a melody and a set of lyrics but who couldn’t deliver a punchline in a handbasket. It was a talent they had no need for, since punchlines had all but disappeared. The Rodgerses and Harts and Hammersteins, the Lerners and Loewes, brilliant men of music and artists of great refinement, had created a vulgarity vacuum, a space we were happy, even anxious to fill.
Our Roman comedy opened in New York on May 8, 1962, complete with leggy showgirls being chased from house to house by cunning slaves, who, in drag a few scenes later, found themselves being chased by their own lecherous masters, unsuspecting dupes high on love potions prepared by these very same slaves, using recipes that called for such exotic ingredients as mare’s sweat.
The show that Time magazine called “good clean, dirty fun” has been running somewhere everywhere in the world for the last twenty-seven years. There was a time when the three of us thought it was going to take at least that long to finish writing it.
Steve has said that “the book of Forum plays like such a romp it seems it might have been dashed off in a weekend, and yet it took four years to write.” I disagree with him only slightly. While it does, or at least should, play like a romp, I remember it taking us closer to five years to dash it off. That’s approximately two hundred and sixty weekends—and most of the weekdays in between—which was all well and good for Plautus, who was that most helpful of collaborators, a dead one (even more helpful, so were his agents and lawyers), but for those of us among the living it was a big chunk of time.
A Roman Comedy was its working title. We were far too busy trying to get the piece right to take any time out to think about what some lucky marquee would one day read if we ever actually
completed a final draft. There were to be ten drafts in all before we arrived at the last, merciful version of the book and score that represented the most successful execution of our vision. It’s not that we kept getting it wrong all the time. It was more a matter of never getting it right all at the same time.
In the process, we rewrote and rewrote endlessly. Rewrote it, rethought it, restructured it. You name it, we redid it. It seemed a lifetime before we permitted ourselves to write that sweetest of all words in the vocabulary of the theater: “Curtain.”
Only then did we dare christen it, if one can use that verb in connection with a pagan comedy. Why the particular title we hit on? Since we wanted to suggest that the play was a comedy without actually using that word, we picked the phrase “A funny thing happened on the way to” because that’s the beginning of a stock opening line which comics have used for ages. “Forum” was chosen to complete the title because we wanted the audience to think immediately of Rome.
But it took us hundreds and hundreds of pages before our comedy was ready for its naming day. And probably just as many measures of music, and reams of rhymes. Steve has said that he threw more songs out of the score for Forum than he’s ever had to on any other show he’s done since. Whole numbers—not fragments or starts with no finishes—written, polished, perfected, and then cut from the show.
For those of you who keep score of scores:
Four by Sondheim Page 1