Sondheim’s ‘Forum’ Establishes Residency in Brooklyn Heights

There’s a very funny moment in the 2025 film “Blue Moon” in which the songwriter Lorenz Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) experiences an awkward meeting with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Hammerstein is accompanied by his young neighbor and protegee, introduced in the dialog only as “Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan) but whom everybody in the audience immediately identifies as the 13-year-old Stephen Sondheim. At one point in the conversation, Hart observes, “Weighty affairs will have to wait”; a few beats later, little Stevie chews the line over, adding an adverb, and it comes out as “Weighty affairs will just have to wait.”’The scene is an invention of the screenwriter Robert Kaplow but it’s a highly engaging idea that Stephen Sondheim heard those words from the lips of Larry Hart in 1943 and used them 19 years later in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” his third show to open on Broadway but the first in which he wrote both the music as well as the lyrics. I find this intriguing, not least because I knew the late Larry Gelbart, who, with collaborator Bert Shrevelove, conceived the show and wrote the libretto. He told me that the two of them had spent an enormous amount time honing the book to perfection, making sure everything worked flawlessly, before they even thought about bringing in a songwriter. It’s a fascinating thought that Sondheim was working on at least one of the lyrics well before “Forum” was even a gleam in Shrevelove and Gelbart’s collective eye.“Forum” which now shines in a modest though captivating production in Brooklyn Heights, was the third hit in a row for Sondheim, following “West Side Story” in 1957) and “Gypsy” in 1959. It quickly became a musical theater classic, with multiple revivals on Broadway and the West End; “Forum” also inspired a very profitable, although musically skimpy, film adaptation by Richard Lester of Beatles movies fame. It’s also the only show wherein the leading men of all three Broadway productions, 1962 (Zero Mostel), 1972 (Phil Silvers), and 1996 (Nathan Lane) have won Tony Awards.The word “Funny” is in the title of the show, and no one would argue that this is by far the most purely comic entry in all of Sondheim’s capacious canon of 20 full-length works. The show is above all funny, and is especially so in David Fuller’s direction, which snaps, crackles and doesn’t miss a laugh. The overall attitude, which, naturally, is much more 1962 than the actual ancient Roman setting, is herewith updated by the Theater 2020 group in what should be considered, at least in proportion to the broad, slapstick-style physical and verbal comedy of the piece, commendable subtlety. There are visual references to The Three Stooges, “Star Wars,” and “Les Miserables,” among other more recent cultural tropes. And some of the characters are given more of a distinctly LGBTQ sensibility; the two leading comic roles, the excellent Ben Schrager as Pseudolus and Robert Fischetti as Hysterium would set off anyone’s gaydar. There’s also gender fluid casting in that the procurer Marcus Lycus is played by a woman, Gillian MacKay Brown, and one of the courtesans, Gymnasia — the one who most entices Pseudolus — is a dude (Tommy Kelly).There are great comic ideas up the wazoo; the Gemini, the two twin courtesans who are only available as a matched set, are both played by Ariella Silvina Nahson Mandel with an “Avenue Q”-like hand puppet. The two juvenile leads, Christian James Potterton as Hero, who looks like a Jack about to climb a beanstalk, and the cherubic Rae Hillman as the delightful ditz Philia, are both sympathetic and surprisingly fertile sources of humor. The comedy is well served, and the musical numbers are generally as well, though it would be nice to have something more than a piano. The lack of physical sets (we get a projected cartoon image of the famous three houses setting) and costumes makes the whole thing feel like a dry run for a more lavishly appointed full-on Off Broadway production, at New World Stages or Theater Row.“Forum” is always welcome, and this is well worth the investment of two-and-a-half hours including intermission, even when you factor in the travel time to The Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center in Schermerhorn Street. Perhaps the biggest laugh comes from MIchael Gnat as Erronius, “a befuddled old man” — played most memorably by two old time comics, Raymond Walburn in the original and Buster Keaton in the film — whose long, sluggish sprint around the seven hills of Rome is, quite literally, one of the greatest running gags in the history of theater.

Sondheim’s ‘Forum’ Establishes Residency in Brooklyn Heights

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