On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle
SUNY Students Perform Burlesque Musical Comedy Tonight, Saturday
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim—book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart—is being performed at SUNY Oneonta, directed by John McCaslin-Doyle. In 1962, this burlesque musical comedy opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre.
I like getting to know a bit about the history of a play, and I had fun with this one. According to the book “Broadway Musicals: Show by Show” and Edward Copeland’s “Tangents,” a blogspot, the musical had a bumpy road getting off the ground. Sondheim couldn’t find the right lead actor, nor the right director. A number of actors turned the lead down for various reasons, while one potential director, Joshua Logan, wanted too much male nudity and another, Jerry Robbins, played hard to get. Zero Mostel, best known for playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway, finally took the lead part.
According to Sondheim, Mostel was desperate for work at the time, as he had been on the Hollywood Blacklist, a list of suspected communists identified in the 1940s and 1950s and compiled by various federal government agencies, in part based on investigations conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. After getting his director and lead actor, Sondheim came to realize his opening number, “Love is in the Air,” wasn’t the right hook to bring the audience into the play. But when Sondheim brought in Robbins to help make the show “click’” things got awkward because Robbins had testified before HUAC against Mostel.
Suffice it to say, I had to be careful as I looked into this production drama, as I could have spent hours going down various rabbit holes. Fortunately, I had the deadlines of this article and an interview with some of the cast and crew members to lure me back to the light. (But the speculations of why are interesting. One hypothesis that especially captured my…Rachel, pull yourself together. You have a deadline!)
