A Conversation with Matthew Gardiner
on Signature Theatre’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
I was thrilled to speak to Matthew Gardiner, artistic director of Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, about this particular theater’s deep relationship with the works of Stephen Sondheim, their current production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (playing until Jan 12; click here for more information and tickets), and his own Sondheim journey. Our conversation begins below:
It’s great to meet you. I’d love to start by asking you about Signature Theatre itself. For those of us who haven’t been lucky enough to visit, give us a sense of Signature and its longstanding relationship with Sondheim’s work.
Sure. Signature Theatre has been around for 35 years. It started in Gunston Middle School. Famously, we presented a production of Sweeney Todd in this converted multi-purpose library/cafeteria space, and it took D.C. theatre by storm. At that time, there was really only the Folger, Arena Stage, and Kennedy Center in terms of major theaters in D.C. That production really put Signature on the map, and it put it on the map as a home for seeing the work of of Stephen Sondheim. And so, for several years, every season there was a Stephen Sondheim musical.
We moved into a converted bumper plating factory about five years into our 35-year history. And now we are in Shirlington Village, which is a part of Arlington County, in a beautiful space that sometimes I say is new, but really isn’t anymore. We’ve been in this space for about 17 years. It’s a beautiful theater with two spaces: one seats 110, the other seats 275, so they’re very intimate spaces. And primarily, our focus is musical theatre: reinventing classics, like the work of Stephen Sondheim, as well as producing new works.
You touched on the dimensions of the space there—do you think size matters when it comes to Sondheim venues?
Yeah. I think what makes Signature unique is that we have figured out some way to be able to do large-scale musicals in a small space. And I think the thing about Sondheim is you always want to be able to hear his lyrics. You want to be able to connect with the actors in a really human way. It’s not like those musicals that are actually served better by being in a big proscenium house where there’s distance. We did a production of Crazy For You that I was very proud of, but also maybe felt a little crammed into Signature, and as a piece perhaps isn’t served as well by having that sort of microscopic view of the actors.
Whereas with Sondheim, being that close to Desirée as she sings “Send in the Clowns” is perfect. I don’t think there are enough theaters in the States that do that. There’s Classic Stage Company and some New York theaters that are really able to lean into that sort of intimacy with a Sondheim musical. But really, that’s been a very British thing—the Menier Chocolate Factory, the Donmar, and so on—so I think that we have found that niche for ourselves here.
Tell me a little about your own relationship with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in particular.
As a young musical theater performer, you know Into the Woods, you know Sweeney Todd… but Forum also. I feel like Forum is one of the earliest Sondheims that I was aware of. It’s so accessible. It’s so easy to connect with as “popular” fare. But I think I also wrote off Forum as un-producible over the last 10 years. It’s been a title that has come up many times. And without digging into the script too much, I had felt like, I love it, but it deals with slavery and sex trafficking. Maybe we shouldn’t do this now. And honestly, it took me seeing other directors play with gender in ways on stage that made me think that Forum can be done in this moment. You just need to look at it from a different angle.
And I think that we’ve done that in the casting of our Pseudolus. The courtesans are a mix of genders. There are three women, two men, and one non-binary individual in the makeup of the courtesans. Erronius is played by a woman in drag. I think by having less rigid ideas about gender within our own production, it’s allowing us to look at the gender dynamics in the piece, and to subvert the misogyny that is inherently in the piece.
What’s also interesting is that in many ways, the 1960s musical was stuck to the rigidness of 1950s and ‘60s gender dynamics and politics. And if you look back at the Plautus comedies that it’s based on, they are much more lascivious. One of Plautus’s comedies has a male prostitute as a central character. In many ways, I feel like we’re going back to the root of Ancient Rome and a Plautus comedy, and stripping away some of the less than savory gender dynamics of a 1960s American musical.
I love that sense of going backwards to then go forwards again. Just on a very practical level, have there been any corners of the score that you’ve needed to tweak to accommodate the gender swap, or has it all been pretty seamless?
Yeah, we’ve had to do some key changes for the Pseudolus songs. The most famous female Pseudolus has been Whoopi Goldberg, and Whoopi sang it in Nathan’s key. Nothing changed—which was not going to happen with Erin Weaver. We had to play with the keys of various songs to make sure it sat in her voice.
And then there are two other changes. We are using the Whoopi Goldberg lyrics. There’s one lyric in “Free” that was changed for Whoopi Goldberg, that makes it a little less lascivious about owning the house of Marcus Lycus, and instead talks about going to the baths. It’s literally two or three lines, but we changed that. And then there’s another change that was first made for Whoopi Goldberg, which is that Pseudolus is buying the courtesan for Hero, as opposed to buying the courtesan for Pseudolus, which I think works very well.
And having known the show for so long, were there moments that you were particularly excited to put your own directorial stamp on?
I’m very proud of what we did with “Love, I Hear” and with “Lovely.” I feel like the characters of Hero and Philia are usually just the straight romantic characters. Even if Philia is a ditz, she’s usually played fairly straightforwardly. And from the audition process forward, I knew that I wanted Hero to be completely overcome with his adolescent feelings of lust. I’ve seen too many young men sing “Love, I Hear” like it’s a romantic song, which is fine—but it is full of sexual innuendo. “I’m dazed, I’m pale, I’m sick, I’m sore…” Zach Keller (who plays Hero) and I have really leaned into the awkwardness of Hero and that pubescent boy weirdness and sexual awakening in a way that I think is quite funny. It takes the song from just being a lovely little love song to something that is sweet, but also lets us feel for Hero.
And then in “Lovely,” I joked the other day that Sondheim might be rolling in his grave, because he’d be like, I wrote a really charming song and you have made it filthy. But yeah, we have really leaned into the the comedy of Hero and Philia. They’re clowns like every other character.
And I think what makes the show work to me is Pseudolus is this really intelligent center. Pseudolus is cunning and the smartest person on stage, and Pseudolus is surrounded by idiots. And I think most of the time, that’s not the dynamic you see on stage. You see some idiots, you see the straight couple of Philia and Hero, and you see Pseudolus, who is another clown. So I’m proud of the dynamic that shifted in the casting of Erin Weaver as Pseudolus, and in the casting of Kuhoo Verma and Zachary Keller as characters who are really, truly clowns.
We’re talking just between previews and opening night—how has the show felt in the room so far?
It’s been extremely well received. And as with any comedy, it changes a lot with an audience, so we learned so much during this preview week. Things that we thought were hilarious in the rehearsal room have fallen completely flat, and we’ve had to send those bits to the bit graveyard. And then also acknowledging that there are certain things that we didn’t really see as particularly funny in the rehearsal room that audiences do. So it’s just been about balancing what’s working with a comedy in front of an audience. You never learn more in any preview process than you do in a comedy’s preview process.
And turning to your own relationship with Sondheim’s work more generally, are there moments that stand out as particularly formative for you?
Yeah. Into the Woods was everything to me. I have memories of just closing my bedroom door and turning on that cast recording and pretending to be Bernadette Peters in a sheet. But I think for me, the moment that changed my life was when the Kennedy Center did the Sondheim celebration in 2002. I was a senior in high school, and I saw all of those shows two or three times. I was an obsessive teenage musical theatre fanatic.
And I swore after seeing that that there’s nobody better than Stephen Sondheim, and I will work for anyone involved in this celebration. And that’s how I met Eric Schaeffer, who was the artistic director of Signature, and the artistic director of the Sondheim celebration. That’s really what set me on the path that I’m on.
That’s awesome. So if people are in or near Virginia sometime between now and January 12, what would would be your final Forum pitch to them?
You will not have the experience of seeing a musical like you will have at Signature. To be that close to people making music, to feeling that kind of emotion, to singing and bursting into song in that way, it’s very rare to experience that in a space like Signature. I always say that that’s why people need to come and experience a show at Signature.
And then if you are in love with intelligent musical theatre, which might seem insane to say with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but I believe that Forum is one of the most intelligently, specifically crafted musical comedies ever written. But if you are a fan of intelligent musical theatre, of the musical theatre that was born of the minds of people like Stephen Sondheim, then Signature is the place for you.