My favorite play and I'm working on a column that will explain why — is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I've seen at least 30 productions of it over the years, ranging from the superb (Phil Silvers as Pseudolus) to the ghastly (a Vegas incarnation that cut songs and added Liberace jokes; it was almost as awful as the movie, which was pretty awful). This evening, I saw one of the oddest — a presentation of the East West Players, a company of Asian actors who have a lovely theater in Downtown Los Angeles, not far from Little Tokyo. The program book and dialogue say it's Ancient Rome but the sets, costume and some of the staging are pure Polynesian. Amazingly, the book by Burt Shevelove & Larry Gelbart, and the songs by Stephen Sondheim all survive the relocation effort. That is to say, none of what's wrong with it is because all the Roman citizens look like they're about to go and sacrifice someone to a volcano.
The problem is that the cast is wildly variable — some great, some not — and they never come together and capture the proper pace and vaudevillian delivery. (In fairness, some of this may have been because the star, Gedde Watanabe, best known for E.R., was out and his stand-by was in.) It's playing at the David Henry Hwang Theater — around the corner from Little Tokyo — through April 15. If you want more details, here's a link to the website.
I don't necessarily recommend this, especially if you haven't seen a traditional mounting. But if you know and love the show and can tolerate a weird variation, you might find it, as I did, fascinating.