[In the following review of a revival of Something Happened on the Way to the Forum, Simon offers a negative assessment of individual performances, choreography, and the direction in contrast to the original production.]

Some gloomy things happened on the way to the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. One of our wittiest, sexiest, smartest, and most songful musicals has undergone a sea change from high to ebb tide. Some of the old felicities are still there, but an essential string is untuned, some crucial tesserae are missing from the mosaic of merrymaking—Thalia, the comic muse, has averted her face from the proceedings.

The original 1962 staging by George Abbott and the choreographer Jack Cole had a marvelously bawdy, lustily heterosexual character, with male and female flesh palpably yearning for each other and the air thick with Plautine bawdry. The cast comprised several mature, even elderly comedians, their Borscht Belt rowdiness as blissfully chomped on as a down-in-the-mouth stogie. Take Zero Mostel, whose Pseudolus I described at the time as “pungent, fatty, succulent, infinitely malleable … the memorial of (at least) twelve Caesars rolled into one, carved out of goat cheese and lecherous as the goats it came from.” This fellow, after many accumulated years of slavery, craved his liberty as hotly as he panted for the courtesans in Lycus's next-door establishment. That round face and round body joined the bulging eyes in one ball of beady concupiscence. Nathan Lane, the currently slimmed-down pseudo-Pseudolus, is too young, too hyper, too campy—and largely unconvincing as the womanizing Pseudolus.

As Hysterium, his fellow slave and castrato co-conspirator, we once had Jack Gilford, an older actor with a meltingly melancholy face, oozing comic plangency, and, in drag, scaling vertiginous heights of absurdity. Mark Linn-Baker is too chipper, not properly hysterical, almost believable in female disguise. Where is the tart savor of Gilfordian chopped liver in the voice, where the innate sweetness peeking through layers of downtroddenness? As Senex, the pussywhipped oldster, we had David Burns, the archetype of overripe, innuendomongering Catskill savvy; now, young Lewis J. Stadlen rasps up a storm, but must we recruit our geezers from among the artful whippersnappers?

Ernie Sabella, however, offers a zesty tub of a Lycus, a pumped-up pimp of full-bodied farce. Even so, John Carradine's 1962 dourly cadaverous procurer was a more dazzlingly original creation. As the formidable termagant Domina, Ruth Kobart was huge, hatchet-faced, and horrific; compared with her, Mary Testa is a mere soubrette. But the usually lithe Cris Groenendaal provides an exemplarily strutting, vainglorious hulk of a Miles Gloriosus, puffed up with ludicrous grandeur. And exquisitely befuddled as Raymond Walburn's Erronius was in the original, the emaciated William Duell, in his different way, is equally droll.

George Abbott made the young lovers, despite the madcap maelstrom around them, obviously in love, with a grace that commanded our empathy and had us rooting for their nuptials; Preshy Marker and Brian Davies contributed a duly lyrical strain. The current Philia, Jessica Boevers, looks goony and acts goofy; Jim Stanek, the new Hero, is nearer the mark, but a silly wig and sillier staging hobble him. Jerry Zaks's direction swamps the romance with farce. And the gorgeous courtesans? The twins do not convey twins, the giantess is the size of one of the other girls, and none of them is remotely as stunning as Lucienne Bridou was back then. Even the all-purpose male trio, the Proteans, though nimble and versatile, prove flimsy in their martial mode.

Most of the singing passes muster, although Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations are brassy and acidulous even where the original ones, by Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin, were ingratiating. Several songs in Stephen Sondheim's ear-entrancing score—one of his two or three best—suffer accordingly, and the frisky “Pretty Little Picture” is, unaccountably, cut altogether. Sad to say, even the incomparable Tony Walton, whose first Broadway assignment was designing the 1962 production, has tried too hard to compete with himself, and cutesiness sneaks in, with the courtesans’ mourning garb worthy of Frederick's of Hollywood. But Paul Gallo's controlledly brash lighting nicely conjures up orange sunbursts and pomegranate nightfalls.

Rob Marshall's choreography, like Zaks's direction, has spots of inspired tomfoolery but is frenetically overzealous, with choreographic and directorial gags bordering on hysteria. It is like an illusionist who—not content with producing one elegant white rabbit—lets his top hat sprout an entire motley warren, thus turning magic into mere mass production.

What remains indestructible is the book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, arguably the most urbane and literate musical-comedy text ever conceived. But much of this sophisticated comedy gets swallowed up by the sight gags, and the often less-than-spot-on delivery by a would-be ensemble frequently on the spot. As the Emperor Augustus upbraided his dead general, Quintilius Varus, for losing him an army in the Teuton forests, I say to Jerry Zaks, “Give me back my legions of joyous moments!”