A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

• Original Broadway Production (1962)
  New York, NY
• London Production (1963)
  London, England
• National Tour (1963)
   
• Australian Production (1964)
   
• Film Version (1966)
   
• Broadway Revival (1972)
  New York, NY
• London Revival (1986)
  London, England
• Off-Broadway Revival (1991)
  New York, NY
• Broadway Revival (1996)
  New York, NY
• London Revival (1999)
  London, England
• Covent Garden Festival Concert (2001)
  London, England
• Royal National Theatre Production (2004)
  London, England
• Australian Revival (2012)
  Melbourne, Australia

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

• Comedy Tonight
• Love, I Hear
• Free
• The House of Marcus Lycus
• Lovely
• Pretty Little Picture
• Everybody Ought to Have a Maid
• I'm Calm
• Impossible
• Bring Me My Bride
• That Dirty Old Man
• That'll Show Him
• Funeral Sequence and Dance
  • aka Dirge [no note]
  • aka Funeral Sequence [no note]

Cut prior to New York previews

• Love is in the Air

Cut during tryout

• Your Eyes Are Blue
• Echo Song

Cut before the first performance

• The House of Marcus Lycus (ii)

Cut during rehearsals

• I Do Like You

Cut before rehearsals

• Happy Endings
• Invocation
• The Window Across the Way
• What Do You Do With a Woman?
• Friends
• Think of Yellow Daisies
• Miles Gloriosus
• There's Something About a War
• The Gaggle of Geese

Added to 1972 revival

• Farewell

• Demo/Studio Cast [audio]
• Composer Demo [audio]

Based on three plays by Plautus: Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus, and Mostellaria.

Composer Stephen Sondheim's first attempt at an opening number was titled "Happy Endings." Then he wrote "Love is in the Air", which seemed to make everyone happy. Except Sondheim. About a month before rehearsals started, he started to feel it was the wrong opening number because it didn't tell the audience what the show was going to be like and he wrote "Invocation" to replace it. George Abbott, the show's director, didn't like "Invocation" so "Love Is in the Air" remained as the opening number when the show opened to an unenthusiastic reception in New Haven and then a disastrous reception in Washington, D.C.

During the Washington run, Jerome Robbins, who at one time had been slated to direct the show, was asked to help out. After seeing the show, Robbins told them that everything was fine but the opening number led the audience to have the wrong expectations of what the show was to be like. Sondheim wrote "Comedy Tonight", and Robbins staged it. Robbins did a good deal of restaging elsewhere as well, which he would eventually detail in a letter to the show's producer, Hal Prince, in which he demanded additional royalties for his work on the show.

As soon as "Comedy Tonight" went into the show — at the first preview in New York — audiences responded with uproarious laughter to the same lines and situations that earlier audiences had greeted with silence.

• Amor al Revés es Roma (Mexican title)
• Miles Gloriosus (source material)
• Mostellaria (source material)
• The Plautus Project (working title)
• Pseudolus (source material)