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A funny thing occurs to the play's director, Richard C. Shank and asssistant during a rehearsal
"A FUNNY
THING ..."
• Is a Broadway musical proper fare for a university theatre?
Let us quote the director of the Cornell production of "A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Richard
C. Shank, who specializes in opera and musical plays: "The
contemporary theatre, as a mirror of its time, presents us with
a period which seems truly Out of joint'—through its psychological
melodramas, pointless domestic plots, and the disturbing
adventures of the absurdists. We are pictured as drawing
farther into our isolated cells, leaving less opportunity for contact
through those humanists' qualities which for centuries
have reassured man of his identity.
"One of those qualities is the inimitably human trait of
humor. If Aristotle's second book of the Poetics, which dealt
with comedy, had not been lost, it probably would have
served as a guidebook to 'A Funny Thing .. .'In fact the style
of this musical unashamedly incorporates many devices from
several of the great comic traditions, including Greek New
Comedy, the commedia delΓarte, and our own vaudeville.
"The thread which runs in common through all these traditions,
beginning with Aristotle's reference to the Phallika, is
man's honest, uninhibited investigation of his universal
"vices" through lampoonery. And one suspects that when the
'body politic' of the audience openly laughs in unison at those
aspects which it shares by nature, there is a movement back
again towards the warmth of identification with the human
race. This may explain, in part, the unusually enthusiastic
reception accorded this seemingly atypical musical."
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