Playing for Laughs

It’s the unbreakable musical. Last time out of its box I saw it performed by college drama students in a production Mickey and Judy—“Let’s put on a play!”—would have enjoyed. It was a staging in which everyone, even the kids who had never turned up for lectures, got a part. It literally rolled on and around the stage and all over the audience. How can you help yourself? When a theatre orchestra starts up and then “Comedy Tonight” hits you, you can’t escape the silly grin. That night, with the thespian kids, even adults who weren’t parents enjoyed themselves. This night, it was a professional, semi-professional cast directed by Robert Jarman, a Hobart-based actor and director who would be quite at home at Sydney’s Belvoir Street. It was a fast-paced and enjoyable production in a perfect setting.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is Stephen Sondheim’s most popular musical. It opened on Broadway in May 1962 and ran for 964 performances. It’s probably never finished running somewhere and this one was in Hobart’s Theatre Royal. It’s a great place to be after the too-big theatres where you only know the tiny figure on the distant stage is someone who used to be big on television because it says so in the program. It’s also pretty good to be sitting in the dress circle when a cast stands centre stage and bellows tunefully at you: 

Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everybody:
Comedy tonight!
Something that’s gaudy,
Something that’s bawdy—
Something for everybawdy!
Comedy tonight! 

Forum always keeps its promise. I’m laughing. We’re all laughing. There is a man on stage (Craig Wellington) dressed inexpertly as a woman. That’s funny. He’s pretending to be dead; it’s a complicated story and funny. A soldier (Andrew Colrain) wants to kiss her/him farewell. That’s very funny. There’s more funny business and a wild chase around the stage. Hilarious. But why is it so funny? These are gags we have seen a thousand times, and a BC Roman audience would have found this funny, just as we do. Strange thing, humour. There’s a 1948 review by George Jean Nathan of a musical version of the “inexhaustible old heifer” Charley’s Aunt. Admitting that even he had once found the sight of a man in woman’s clothes funny, Nathan says he had grown out of this by the time he had matured a little, about the age of ten. Fortunately, for the rest of us, getting pleasure from slapstick chestnuts, vaudeville, even stand-up comedy, seems to be wired into us.

John Xintavelonis is on stage and he makes me laugh. He has the utterly dishonest smirk of the born clown. Maybe he could play Mo? When he leers, you know he’s going to rob and abuse you but he is so transparently disarmingly dishonest, so deliciously wily and corruptible that when he slips his hand into the pocket of your toga you surrender EFPTOS card and PIN without a murmur—or you would do if they had been invented in third-century BC. But that’s all wrong; one of the things about Forum is that the jokes don’t depend on anachronisms. It’s more Plautus than Wayne and Shuster. Remember their “Rinse the Blood Off My Toga” sketch? The one with Flavius Maximus, Private Roman Eye? It’s not like that. This may be part of the reason it’s lasted almost forty years. Oh, and the great music and witty words of course,

While the spotlight’s on him let’s get back to John X. Hobart-based, he’s become a bit more well known nationally over the last few years. In the program it says he’s been buzzing around appearing in the Threepenny Opera at The Malthouse and Sydney Theatre Company, in Billy Elliot, The Lion King and on television and film. Island audiences used to know him as John X, then he lost weight, worked on the mainland and now appears as John Xintavelonis. As his waistline contracted his surname expanded; perhaps it’s a Greek thing. This is a career that could really take off with the right play because, and it’s a rare feeling, he gives the impression that there is something more to his playing that hasn’t yet been revealed. Even as he makes you laugh there is a flash of an elusive and deeper quality that the actor carries about but which you can’t quite see. Perhaps the cliché of the comic wanting to play Lear wasn’t something that originated with a performer but may be a feeling audiences get about actors they like. It may be that it is us, sitting in the dark, who add something to what we are seeing onstage, and paying a compliment to an actor who speaks to us. 

Still, while I’m casting John X there is something different he could play: Shylock. Broadway critic Walter Kerr was a college drama teacher before becoming a newspaper theatre critic. He wrote a provocative essay on Shylock (you’ll find it in his collection Thirty Plays Hath November) in which he argued that the role is not the tragic part we have grown used to but is a comic characterisation. Last year Al Pacino, after playing the role in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, again played Shylock in a Broadway production. And again played the tragic Jew. Most theatre historians do point out that the part was originally comic but Kerr takes this a step further. He is not suggesting playing the role as a low comedy Der Stürmer caricature or making fun out of what we read as gross Elizabethan Jewish stereotyping. Shylock, he suggests, is a Pantalone type figure from the commedia dell’arte repertoire. The stock character, he says, would have been familiar to Shakespeare from the contemporary performances of Italian troupes in London. Over time, actors playing Shylock moved from comedy to tragedy. Modern productions run from the anti-Semitism and the play has even been banned in some American schools. As he reads the part Kerr points to its comedy and explains those moments of great truth and poignancy which we are familiar with as “that unexpected stab of sorrow that so often accompanies the comic image when it is raised to its highest power”. A great comedian could restore the comic villain and retain the tragedy in a courageous production that did not seek to hide or excuse the anti-Semitism—to do so would just be another pointlessly politically correct evasion.

Finding opportunity in what he believed was an Elizabethan traducing of the Jews, Arnold Wesker wrote his own Shylock as a counter-play. His leading character was a shining hero of morality and probity. It was to have opened on Broadway in 1977 with Zero Mostel as Shylock. After the first preview in Philadelphia, Mostel died and the production bombed. Wesker wrote an interesting book on what happened: The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel. His leading man was a seriously difficult individual and there are not many jokes. Mostel, who starred with Gene Wilder in the film of The Producers, had earlier been the lead in the first production of Forum, and Wesker’s play was to have been his great moment as a serious actor. An even greater role for him might have been as Shakespeare’s Shylock (if he could have been made to simply read the words and not invent his own, as he did) and playing it as comedy: as its author intended, argues Kerr.

The Merchant with a comic Shylock, and not another pointless modern-dress Shakespeare, would be worth seeing. Kerr was thinking of Ralph Richardson or Bert Lahr. Barry Humphries could have done it, and he has played the Shylock-inspired Fagin in Oliver! It could be an innovative production for Xintavelonis—though dealing frankly with Elizabethan attitudes towards Jews could be too strong for a modern theatre director or audience. At the beginning of Kerr’s essay is an illustration of a hook-nosed, black-gowned medieval figure. At the end of his essay Kerr tells his readers that the illustration is not an offensive anti-Semitic drawing of Shylock but a traditional representation of Pantalone.

Actually, taking John X and casting him as Shylock and then building a production of the Merchant around that performance and attempting to restore the play as a comedy would make a good subject for a film documentary, and the production, especially if played in the Theatre Royal, would be worth a DVD in itself. 

Tonight, it’s not about a merchant of Venice but a slave of Rome. It’s pseudo-Plautus Rome somewhere in the third century BC. It’s a bright John Bowling set of three neighbouring houses with light colourful costumes by Roz Wren. Xintavelonis plays Pseudolus, a slave to Hero. Hero, son of Senex, is played by Ben Paine. Hero is a simple young lover. Paine plays with such simple-minded openness that you uncomfortably look twice to reassure yourself that he really is acting. Hero loves Philia (Imogen Moore), a beautiful but simple courtesan from the stock of Marcius Lycus (Paul Levett), “a buyer and seller of courtesans” who lives next door. If Pseudolus can bring them together in marriage he will gain his freedom. It’s as simple as that without, of course, the major obstacles that have to be overcome to bring about a happy ending.

Jeff Michel plays Hero’s downtrodden father Senex. Di Richards, as his wife Domina in Marge Simpson wig, does the downtreading. Senex develops as a dirty old man who lusts after Hero’s love. When the program gets to Marcius Lycus’s occupation of buying and selling courtesans the writing has a fit of the PCs and points out, “We know this is not politically correct, but it took place long ago when it was just bad taste.” Erronius, a muddled and befuddled old man, is played by Daryl Peebles, and Miles Gloriosus, who had bought the courtesan loved by Hero, is played by Andrew Colrain. And Craig Wellington, in smart Roman slave gear and smart black-framed glasses, plays Hysterium, head household slave at Senex’s place. Enmeshed in Pseudolus’s Machiavellian machinations he dresses as Hero’s love who is supposedly dead but he blows it when Miles Gloriosus tries to give him a farewell kiss. All ends happily as promised when it is discovered that Philia is Gloriosus’s sister and that the two are the lost children of Erronius. Got that? If not, enjoy the songs and the courtesans and the assorted Proteans who play all the other roles.

Unlike most modern musicals this one breaks the Rodgers and Hammerstein rules. The Sondheim songs are not integrated and do not lead the action forward. They hold everything up while the actors have a nice sing-along. It’s something modern writers should pay attention to. 

Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!