"Comedy Tonight" is the
perfect song for what I love so much about comedy and film or television in
general, but I also love "Free" between the play and one of my
favourite films (even if it's not in the film haha) from "A Funny a Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum": "Perhaps like the classic Greek
and Roman plays the musical pays humorous tribute to, we have a brilliant range
of wonderfully ‘round’ stock characters, as full of dimensions as they are very
(unequivocally) happily lodged in their stereotypes, so much larger-than-life.
It is firmly yet fluidly heterosexual, vaudevillian humour, bouncing off solid
frames to become unbound and lift up from the congruous to the surprising.
These characters who we now might see as uncomfortably un-PC [too vaudeville]
or even just too in-your-face – all of this just makes it so much easier to
relate to them without having to be represented in anyone, to hear the human
voice in their songs, to laugh at them sometimes and to laugh with them, to be
the minority or the broken pushing through to create 'ardently, feverishly' (to borrow Fishko's words on Sondheim), radiant and outrageous worlds in limelight.
And I think just the voice of the 'minority' that Laurents mentions, minorities that are wanting, needing, hoping, aching – minorities (whatever you want that to mean!) anyone with a dream, people wishing and longing for dreams that can become real, people who long to be free of sadness or difficulty or anything like that, that’s what Stephen Sondheim wrote and composed." I adore Zero Mostel in the 1966 film and original stage soundtrack, but I was never so moved by the piece until hearing the recording from the 1963 London production, featuring Frankie Howerd as Pseudolus and John Rye as Hero, now my favourite version that I like to listen to at night, pretend I'm at those magic premieres of the shows, and dream Xo
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