A Fractured Fairy Tale

THERE ARE SOUND reasons for casting a cold eye on the Hasty Pudding Show. Its participants can't quite say, like Robert Lowell in Life Studies, that "there were no undesirable or girls in my set"--the show's stage crew has included women for several years. Even the parent Hasty Pudding Club began admitting women two years ago (it wanted to acquire Faculty members, for financial reasons, and it figured the policy change would help), and there probably never were any rules against undesirables. Still, the Pudding cast is one of the last all-male--this year it's all-white, too--enterprises at Harvard, and it usually relies heavily on a clubby, ivy-covered-boys-in-the-ivy-covered-backroom appeal, whose one fundamental, never-failing joke is that women--portrayed by men whose condescension is a secondary joke--are inherently ridiculous.

Under the circumstances, the only way to keep the Pudding's presumptive risibility from starting a short slide into unredeemed offensiveness (short of breaking outright with all-male tradition, which, as a Theatrical co-producer explained two years ago, would result in "pressure to present a great musical") is to make everything else equality ridiculous. That way, the show doesn't need to depend on drag jokes or anti-homophile inferences--in fact, they can be eliminated entirely. Instead, in show in which royal banquets where "the liquor flows like wine" are interrupted by would-be regicides with wooden spoons ("to stir the people to rebellion"), the chorus-line becomes one more irrelevant frill, part of an endless series whose insouciance about ordinary standards of sense as well as sensibility lets you just sit back and listen to the one-liners crackle by.

The best thing about Put Up Your Dukes--and it's enough to make it consistently funny in defiance of 127 years of Pudding tradition--is Mark O'Donnell's script. O'Donnell wrote last year's script, too, but this year he's carried his major innovation, the introduction of a plot, a step further. This year's plot, which is something like the Fractured Fairy Tales that used to separate Rocky from Bullwinkle, is moderately interesting. It holds everything together, too, which is just as well: the show's strength lies less in individual moments (some people admire the big bondage-and-discipline number, but its inevitable punch-line. "We've got nothing to lose but our chains," is an awful long time coming) than in its unflagging continuity in a texture which-as a friend from Lampoon explained to me--soaks up puns unobtrusively, "the way bread soaks up puns unobtrusively, "the way bread soaks up wine." Almost every line in the script has a joke in it somewhere, often so naturally imbedded in the basic joke of the plot (quailing before Otto da Fe, the Earl of Fourflush who announces that he won't be satisfied "until everyone is dead," one of the heroines vainly offers so "give you my silver gold-piece") that it's more than likely to slip by unnoticed, or to register only a few minutes later, when the show has already gone on to something else. There are also some lovely visual puns: the royal coach is announced, and then jogs in in a sweatshirt, blowing his whistle; the Princess Purins makes her first entrance "idly turning the pages of the royal register"--two patient but slightly dizzy-looking boys. As a result of all this, the show has a relaxed feeling to it--as though laughs came so easily to O'Donnell that he could afford to just throw some of them away. And it also keeps you on you toes.

DENNIS CROWLEY's and David Thomas's music is less likely to bring you to your feet, I guess, It's an eclectic as it should be--the first-act finale is vaguely reminiscent of "Another Opening, Another Show" from Kiss Me, Kate, and I'm told there's also a direct quotation from an all but totally obscure pre-Gilbert opera by Sir Arthur Sullivan--but the tunes aren't very memorable, and O'Donnell's lyrics ("We're not exactly in Utopia. Our queen could scarcely be dopier") don't seem up to the rest of his script, either. In the second act, the silliness of having songs at all often lends them a certain amount of sense, as in the case of a ballad sung in suitably Gilbert-and-Sullivanish style by Greg Minahan, as a response to Otto da Fe's discovery of half the cast in the act of escape from his deadliest dungeon. But in the first act, especially, not even Voight Kempson's professional choreography makes the songs more than pleasant breaks in the action.

Kempson's direction is equally professional--there are none of the awkward breaks between lines or scenes that often plague this kind of loosely jointed farce--and a number of the actors, in a show not traditionally renowned for unusual brilliance in this respect, achieve more than just competence. Lindsay Davis makes a fine Colleen Allcars, Mark Kiely is impressively diabolical as the evil earl and Jonathan Emerson as his equality villainous accomplice ("efficient, but a strange woman...she's donating her body to science fiction"), and Matthew Gamser is appropriately straightforward as the bassest soprano since The Love for Three Oranges. Best of all, I think, is Peter Zurkow as the perpetually befuddled queen, a well-meaning though not very intelligent Edith Bunker of a monarch who wants to turn back from her escape because she forgot to turn the stove off, and who pours the royal treasury's last gold into a rift in the earth because she's "always been generous to a fault."

William Fregosi's sets are fine, and so is Frank Racette's band; if the chorus is often hard to understand, it's only the lyrics that you miss. The main point, though, is that unlike the yogurt that the Pudding includes in one of its many silly promotional deals, Mark O'Donnell seems to be mellowing with age.