St rollin' Down Memory Lane...
“I hear that you got a 1600 on the SAT...well, I got a 1790.”
“Wait, you can’t do that! 1600 is the maximum score!”
“No, 1790 is when the first Spencer stepped onto the grounds of Harvard College.”
“Oh, I see...”
So begins “Reunion,” a humorous yet poignant musical chronicling those four Harvard years and the permanent crimson tint they add to one’s post-college life perspective. Dr. Philip Carl ’61, the lyricist, Dan Kline ’61, the book writer, and Stephen Price ’61, the composer, collaborated on this commerative work for their Class of 1961’s 40th Reunion last weekend. The musical was included in the Second Annual Festival of New Works for the Musical Stage, co-sponsored by New Opera and Muscial Theatre Inititative and North Shore Music Theatre in 2000, and several of the tunes recently won awards at a Boston musical theater contest. Local actors and students from Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory of Music were solicited to perform a staged reading of the musical to a packed Science Center B Saturday night.
The three Harvard amigos actually wrote their first project in 1958, a comedy about the ongoing space race called “Countdown!,” which debuted in 1960 as a “modest production” in Leverett House. Carl remembers, “I grew up in a home with musical theater–my father was a piano player, and I sang in the high school Glee Club, so I knew about 2000 songs by the time I got here. I then found Steve [Price] who loved musical theater as well, and we got together and had some great times working together.”
Fast forward to the 35th reunion, where the seed for “Reunion” was planted when Carl sang a few show tunes at the festivities’ variety show. Kline remembers, “After the show, I e-mailed him saying, ‘Hey, your songs were really good...want to collaborate on writing a musical or something?’ We then batted ideas back and forth by e-mail and started putting something together.”
This two-and-a-half-hour long journey down memory lane focuses on two roommates, Joe and Blake, their Radcliffe wives Natalie and Anne, respectively, and their circle of friends. The musical alternates between flashbacks of the roommates’ college days in the late 50’s and their 25th reunion in 1986. Joe is an upstart kid from Brooklyn while Blake is a prep schooler with legacy to the gills; yet improbably enough, they remain roommates all four years, each figuring out what makes the other irritating yet intriguing. At their class reunion 25 years later, friendships are put to the test when the facades each character had created to hide his real troubles comes tumbling down.
Carl explains, “We based the musical on the red books, the Class Reports, and the discrepancy between the image that’s put forth and the reality. People write in saying impressive things, like they’ve been promoted at work or that they’ve just bought a Burgundian vineyard, when in reality, their marriage is on the rocks and they’ve been going through some tough times.”
Though self-inflation hits close to home with Harvard students regardless of when they’ve graduated, the musical is mainly a comedy, with witty and sometimes laugh-out-loud commentary on the idiosyncrasies of Harvard. After all these years, some things about Harvard never change, as evidenced by the opening song, “A Freshman’s Lament”: a classmate boasts of his studies at the Mozart Institute in Salzberg or of his recently published book, which provokes another panicked classmate to cry in the chorus, “Good God, why am I here? There must be some mistake, they picked the wrong guy...” Also included: a serenade to tax evasion (“No one pays taxes but paupers and fools!”) and a lesson in how to drop the name of Harvard into any conversation ( “Yes, this weather is gorgeous...it reminds me of my good ole’ college days in New England, along the Charles River...” “Hey, isn’t that where Harvard is?” “Why, yes it is!”
Some of the musical’s serious moments include a satirical take on class warfare with the tune “Better Bed,” where an argument arises between Joe and Blake on who deserves the bottom bunk. Kline commented, “We confront some serious issues in this musical as well, such as the class system, private versus public schools, which was very heavy at the time. And we talk about aging–everybody gets old some time!”
The three authors also openly confront the fact that everyone puts up facades of well-being at reunions, as Joe’s crumbling marriage and Joe’s deteriorating eyesight come to the surface. A touching lovestory between Joe’s estranged wife, Natalie, and a certain nice guy named Paul rekindles after the two met decades before at the freshman musical. And in one last blast of humor, a classmate’s coming out turns into a Broadway-esque showshopper tune.
Offstage, Philip Carl teaches molecular biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Dan Klein is a writer, and Stephen Price is a practicing psychoanalyst who teaches at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in Brookline. Carl noted, “This musical is about all the things you can’t learn while at Harvard–we certainly couldn’t have written it at your age...We didn’t want to write about Vietnam, women’s liberation, or any of the other major things–we wanted to write about friendship and how it lasts.” Kline added, “It’s about being realistic but hopeful: our classmates have survived illnesses, death of spouses and children, hard times at work, and other tragedies; but life goes on.”