Word: pseudolus
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...FORUM. Even though Director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night, The Knack) tries hard, he cannot spoil all of the fun in this hilarious burlesque based on the plays of Plautus. The funniest things happen to Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers and Jack Gilford, playing Pseudolus, Lycus and Hysterium, three dirty old men in dirty old Rome...
...FORUM. Even though Director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night, The Knack) tries hard, he cannot spoil all of the fun in this hilarious burlesque based on the plays of Plautus. The funniest things happen to Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers and Jack Gilford, playing Pseudolus, Lycus and Hysterium, three dirty old men in dirty old Rome...
This pattern may spread, may well be the shape of domestic service in an industrial democracy. And so, alas, exeunt Jeeves, Passepartout and Pseudolus, to become IBM cards in the files of an impersonal Mary Poppins, Inc. No "existentialist bond" perhaps, no love lost, no mutual dependence. But at least-and at best-a new, professional sense of service and a more civilized life...
This musical comedy is set in pagan Rome and is lewdly adapted from the plays of Plautus, who should really have been named Sub-Plautus. He was a genius at inventing endless slapsticky plot complications. The story is that Pseudolus (Zero Mostel), a slave, will be granted his freedom if he can secure as his master's bride a dumb blonde virgin (Preshy Marker) who has completed her basic training as a courtesan. After a dilatory start, George Abbott's pell-mell direction crosscuts from the chaste to the chase. Pseudolus must foil all the males...
Albert Borowitz, as the scheming slave Pseudolus, is the perfect clown. He is stealthy one moment, moronic the next; when he comes out in the last scene balancing a bottle of Schlitz on his head and drinking from a hot-water bag, even the most non-Roman audience cannot help laughing. John Rexine, the pimp, brandishes his curses and his whip as if he had done nothing else all his life, and Paul Broneer and Joe Dallett, as the dupe and his swaggering impersonator, are well-cast. The love scene between Arthur Millward and Brooks Emmons is a spicy reminder...