The Roar of the Greasepaint

The Pudding

Hasty Pudding: a mixture of corn meal mush, spiced with salt, and served steaming with milk and molasses. --Theodore Chase in the Harvard Advocate, 1933

Bring on the pot of steaming mush,

The treacle and the can,

And treat me as they ought to treat

A Hasty Pudding Man!   --anonymous schoolmaster lamenting his absence from a Hasty Pudding show, circa 1900

The History

The Hasty Pudding Club was founded "to cultivate the social affections and cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism, being the first of duties and sublimest of enjoyments." The club began holding mock trials of its members in the early 19th century, and switched over to burlesque when advocacy got boring. The first show, Bombastes Furioso, opened in 1844.

In its long and honorable existence there never has been imputed to this Club any charge of disorder. The fun is wholesome, the living is plain and the thinking as high as can reasonably be expected.   --J.T. Wheelwright, Class of 1876

...A curtain rises upon the sempiternal comedy of youth, written with never-flagging genius, played with never-failing charm. God bless the old Club and the old days--they were so full of wholesome pleasures.'"   --Lloyd M. Garrison, Class of 1888

The Show

T.V. cameramen swarm through the upper story of the Hasty Pudding's senescent building as the place fills with a formal-wear crowd--so many penguins waiting on John Travolta's arrival. Travolta is about to give a press conference, and his fans gather below on Holyoke St. Lights flash on, cameras start to roll, but before Travolta can be introduced, the chant floats in from outside: "We want John! We want John!" It doesn't even rhyme.

"How do you feel about being given the Hasty Pudding's Man of the Year award?"

"It's an illustrious school, a very..." The fans drown Travolta out.

"What will you be doing in 20 years?"

A hesitation, a toothy grin. "More of the same."

So much for the press conference. Travolta is hustled away by rotund men with electronic devices in their ears. Are they undercover police? Or Travolta fans with hearing problems?

Up another flight, the evening's chief activity is well underway, as sweating tuxedoed men spill cheap champagne out of shallow glasses onto the expensive dresses of their dates. "Who are these people? Do you know any of them?" Someone's question wafts across the room, but it's impossible to tell who asked it. Everyone is smiling.

A half-hour later, everyone's moved downstairs into the theater, and it's time for Travolta's official presentation. The band strikes up a sort of Broadway-tuned "Stayin' Alive," and he strides down the aisle, anxiously tugs his bowtie, smiles as a small army of press cameras assaults him, and takes a seat. The show's producers take the stage, nervously fumble their introduction, and Travolta moves towards the mike. And stands there. Sheepishly, he throws his arm into a Saturday Night Fever diagonal, to cheers; then the band steps in to save him--playing "Happy Birthday," it conveniently being Travolta's.

"His tuxedo is beautiful," someone whispers. "And his hairstyle..." Members of the cast hand him a blond wig and a pink negligee, which he poses with awkwardly for a minute, looking perplexed. Finally he speaks: "My dad was very proud. He said, Harvard, that's the most illustrious, the most prestigious school in the country." Someone shouts, "It's all bullshit."

The Other Show

Reviewing the Hasty Pudding Show is sort of like reviewing Halley's Comet--it just comes around at regular intervals, and everybody sees it. The show's great strength is predictability--its motto might be semper eadem. And if you think predictability in theater sounds like a bad thing, well, you're in the minority--the lady ahead of me in the box office line bought 40 tickets. Opening night audience members paid $25 each for the extra privilege of seeing the Man of the Year ceremony and getting soaked in champagne.

Serfs Up! is the Hasty Pudding's 133rd theatrical production, and by now, you'd think, the fermented-in-bottle mixture of show music, puns, dancing and drag might be running a bit weak. But undergraduate talent tends to rise phoenix-like every few years, and if the shows run into dull periods, they always eventually seem to revive. The singing, dancing, and punning in this year's show are all at least good, and occasionally extraordinary, I'm happy to report--and the fake busts, nylons, and skirts are all in place.

You can't help wondering, though--as you watch a young man in drag dancing up a storm and then snapping a "Hi, mom," into the audience--how this relic of "gentlemanly" fun has survived, or why. Whatever the topical theme of each show, the jokes always return to that most undergraduate of comical subjects, sex--and the humor is not always only verbal. Would the Pudding audiences find it less funny to see an actress fondle a mop-end than an actor in drag? When the audience guffaws as the kick-line picks up its skirts to reveal red garters and yellow panties, what is it laughing at--the drag? More often, the semi-sloshed, thigh-slapping enjoyment at the Pudding Show seems almost prurient--as though the audience would like to see the real thing, but will settle for licensed imitation. It's just one of those little incongruities that can creep into your mind if you haven't been popping champagne corks as quickly as your neighbor.

The conventions of the Pudding Show are like that--the student writers and performers can take all sorts of liberties as long as they stick within the chief boundaries. The audience is harangued when it hisses a pun: "Go drink some more champagne"; "C'mon, gimme a break, I have to say that every night." But the actors go right ahead with the next pun--that's what the people have paid for.

And the puns in Serfs Up! are, on the whole, extremely good. They help make more than usually bearable the Pudding Show plot, which--no matter where or when it is set--always seems to come out the same: wicked, chesty baritone schemes to murder or domineer others as air-head, goldilocks daughter falls in love with dim-wit tenor. Serfs Up!'s Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail setting--with dozens of "thou's" thrown in--provides plenty of comic soil for puns to take root in; but it doesn't materially affect the stock Pudding plot--even if there is a peasant revolution, nasal lords and ladies, smelly peasants, and a trio of disco-dancing suits of armor.

John Balbus and Paul Wolfson have written about as enjoyable a Pudding Show as you could hope for--and, I suppose, if they had written anything different the show would have gone to someone else's script. But it's to Michael Schubert's music that Serfs Up! really owes its energy. Schubert wrote the score for last year's A Little Knife Music; this year's score seems far the better--more memorable tunes, more intricate ensemble writing, and a generally more subtle, less showy approach. His references are, well, eclectic--there are snatches of Brahms, the Beach Boys, Herb Alpert, and Scott Joplin mixed in with Schubert's own tunes.

What in the end makes every Pudding Show a crowd-pleaser is the curtain-dropping kick-line. About halfway through the second act plot-lines begin to dissolve into a haze of anticipation; the audience gets restless waiting for the show's payoff. You forget about which actor played what part; they all don the same costumes, line up downstage, and dance. They kick, tap, waltz, jump, charleston--in Serfs Up! they even roll over and kick their feet in the air. This year's kick-line has excitement, surprises, and laughs, and even if the rest of the show--or the people next to you remarking "Excellent!" at every pun--have left you cold, you won't be bored.

Serfs Up's company has fewer stand-outs than last year's, and more cohesion. For voice, I'd single out Willis Emmons' Ella Gittamette and John Stimpson's Duncan Donutt; for acting, John Sheehan's vulpine queen, Lady Fingers, and Benajah Cobb's Anna Cleavage--whose voice, however, was inaudible in several songs. But certainly the group numbers--like the worker's chorus, "Contract Diseases"--shined more than any individual performance, and the chorus singing throughout was intelligible and invigorating.

"Contract Diseases," though, came after the intermission--and by then any breathalyzer readings in the theater would have gone haywire. People were clapping along and drinking the champagne from the bottle, and if the show's cast had sat down on the edge of the stage and told "knock-knock" jokes the giggles would have been uncontrollable. The Hasty Pudding Show will continue as long as there are people who go to the theater to do what they want to do, which in this case is drink and laugh; as long as the alumni who buy tickets want to remember those college days, even if they weren't laughing all the time then; and as long as Boston and Cambridge people buy tickets to the show because they want to affiliate themselves with this "most illustrious" school. J.T. Wheelwright '76 (1876) wrote in an essay about the Pudding Show that the returning alumnus "finds himself a stranger where once he was most at home. But if he revisits the College to witness a Pudding Play he is at once immersed in the fountain of youth. He is another Ponce de Leon." Ponce, you may recall, only thought he found his goal.