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Why should the National revive this evergreen mix of Plautine comedy and American vaudeville? One answer, as Edward Hall's joyously eclectic production proves, is that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is both a nostalgic throwback and a pioneering experiment - a musical farce predating The Producers by 40 years.
The book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart is a brilliant synthesis of stock characters from Plautus: the manipulative slave, the military braggart, the senescent lecher. But, into this cat's cradle of a plot about the attempts of Pseudolus to secure a bride for his master, Stephen Sondheim has inserted a group of songs that literally stop the show.
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Hall has shrewdly recruited the Right Size's Hamish McColl to play the quivering Hysterium. Philip Quast parodies the macho solemnity he has brought to earlier musicals by playing Miles Gloriosus as a vain sex object suspending his helmet from his private parts.
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