Word: bushed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Tim Hunter has given Forum plenty of sight-gags and a Burlesque flavor, the two prerequisites for getting boffs. But you laugh hardest when the pace is fastest, and it moves like the Marx Brothers whenever Steve Kaplan, Arthur Friedman, Robert Bush, (or any combination of them), are on stage. Kaplan is the funniest Roman of them all, and he plays the conniving lead, Pseudolus, with deadly timing, a rubber face, a protean voice, and a Stoic endurance of pratfalls. His is a virtuoso performance, and at one point his delivery of a line stops the show cold. When...
Arthur Friedman, playing a ruined procurer, and Bob Bush as an hysterical slave, bring to their roles the high desperation and brisk timing which make farce funny...
...acting is completely gimmicky, but with fast and clever gimmicks. Chumley has mastered an idiot grin, and cartwheels admirably across the stage. Miss Bush and her counterpart Dame Chat (Joan Tolentino) scream too much, but their grimaces and multicolor petticoats (Lewis Smith's costuming is superb) more than compensate. In smaller parts, David Dunton as a myopic curate is the only actor to read, rather than chant his lines, and his care pays off in laughs. Ed Jay, Jr., as a sleepy Linus-figure with a patchwork blanket, is trapped in his one sight gag, but is pleasant enough...
...plot, as much as one cares, is about the strange disappearance of Dame Gurton's sewing needle (Raye Bush is Gammer, not the needle). We eventually find it in the britches of her man Hodge (Dan Chumley), an acrobatic archetypal simpleton, but not until Diccon the Bedlam (Dan Deitch) has thrown everyone at each other's throats and chickens...
...remarkably successful maneuver. Storming into the city, government troops killed scores of gendarmes and drove hundreds of others into the bush. Part of the Katangese force managed to escape in a column that included 14 commandeered beer trucks and all the city's ambulances, but it did not get far. When reconnaissance planes spotted it on the highway south toward Katanga last week, Mobutu dispatched troops to a river crossing 450 miles from Kisangani, where the Kats were virtually wiped out. An ambush destroyed the first trucks to cross the river, and Congolese air force planes took care...