A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Two summers ago, while fulfilling a long-felt wish, Greg J. Hipius gained a valuable insight into community theater marketing. He had long wanted to produce Sherman Edwards’ musical 1776, requiring a huge male cast and oodles of costumes. He struck gold at the box office and at awards time during the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) ceremony. Despite the polished, up-to-date offerings from Auburn’s Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, or even the Talent Company’s upcoming West Side Story, there remains a substantial audience in town for the vintage musical, the kind of show that makes you laugh and leaves you humming. And people like to see it in June before school ends. And thus we have the still-fresh 1962 hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the beginning of the summer, now playing as Appleseed Productions’ season finale at Atonement Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave.

That long, long title tells us what we need to know. “A funny thing . . .” is the conventional opening line for a burlesque comic, and four of them dominate the action. Prime is Pseudolus (Hipius), the slave wanting to win his freedom from his old master Senex (Lanny Freshman, our top vaudevillian). The second banana/second slave is the madcap Hysterium (Michael Spinoso Jr., the fourth time in this role). And rounding out the quartet is Lycus (the usually more resolute Mark Allen Holt), a buyer and seller of courtesans. Put together we have broad comedy, broads and a Stephen Sondheim score from before his discovery of anxiety.

The second part of the title, “ . . . on the way to the Forum,” signals that the show is also writers Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart’s spoof of Roman comedy, specifically of Plautus. That’s why director/set designer Dustin M. Czarny has constructed the necessary three doorways, for rapid exits and entrances. There’s also a full array of stock characters, such as the dominating older woman Domina (Patricia Elise Catchouny), the misled old man Erroneus (Harlow Kisselstein) and the vain, self-important soldier, Miles Gloriosus (Bill Ali).

Tall, roundish and fair-haired, Hipius is not a natural for Pseudolus, a role frequently handed off to an ugly ethnic, but he’s given to impish improvisation. In an early moment he says that the theater should be seen as a temple, or in this case, “underneath one,” pointing his thumb up to the sanctuary of Atonement Church on the next floor. Or when called upon to impersonate a soothsayer under a shawl, he comes up with the magical incantation, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” Hipius and company score big with the show’s best number, “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” while not neglecting the undercurrent of leering that reminds us that servant girls might be asked to do more than dust and clean.

Attached to the frivolity is the love story of two virgins trying to join hearts, Hero (Dan Williams), and the well-born courtesan he and Pseudolus are trying to free from bondage, Philia (Danan Healy). Strengthening the production, these two newcomers also bring the best voices in the show so that the Act I song, “Lovely,” carries a plausible resonance. Healy is triply blessed, first in voice and second with blonde hair framing a drop-dead-gorgeous face. Better yet, she brings a flair for comedy, getting laughs from the falling-in-a-well shtick.

Forum came out the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and as we might expect the courtesans are horribly politically incorrect. The young ladies, played by Jane Garlow, Erica Deiderich, Monica Chetwin, Theresa Egloff, Megan M. Flanagan and Jessica Lee Skipper-Kimpland, gamely allow for a few bare navels but otherwise do not challenge Lutheran community standards.

Never cramped by space, Rachelle Clavin’s choreography fills the stage, and music director Colin Keating ably leads a seven-player ensemble from a screen. It’s a fast-paced, rollicking show where the wigs fall off at the right time.

This production runs through June 27.
See Summer Stage Directory for information.

—James MacKillop