[In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum] Richard Lester has painted on film a manic montage of vaudeville turns, girlie-book jokes, movie bits and gag cartoons that congeal, magically, into art…. With Designer Tony Walton he has built an ancient Rome noble only in its houses of debauchery and steeped everywhere else in a middle-class decay that could easily make it a First Century Watts. Within this he manages, quite improbably, to expand space to the point of infinity and suffuse it with the light of a Steinberg cartoon.

Forum on stage was a raucous, rakish, baggy-toga burlesque, set slightly off-balance by its star, Zero Mostel, whose talent gave it an unneeded class, and, again off-balance, by a score with more wit and urbanity than audiences, under the circumstances, were prepared to listen to. Delightful though it was, the show was not of one...