A Double Helping of Pudding

The Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard University puts on one original musical each year. So how was I able to see two completely different Pudding Shows this week?

Let’s take Terms of Frontierment first, which I caught on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Sunday. This 157th annual Hasty Pudding Show takes place in the Wild West, where Luke N. Forglory, a Daniel Boone type, meets Western dance hall entertainer Chicksie Dix and whorehouse madam Iona Brothel. He also meets Chief Lester Thamohicans and Pocahotness, two Indians who have a culture clash with Sam Osa, a genuine Indian from New Delhi.

The early Pudding shows consisted largely of humor that only a Harvard student (or maybe a ‘Cliffie) would get. This year, the line “You make a tenured Harvard professor look lively” is a worthy continuation of that tradition. Then, when everyone enters a desolate town, one character quips, “Nobody told me we were going to New Haven.” (Actually, if you look at current surveys of the best colleges, Harvard’s prime rival is now Princeton, not Yale. Pudding authors Maggie Shipstead and John Blickstead must know that, but they probably want to honor tradition — and maybe they didn’t want to stoop to making yet another New Jersey joke.)

But there are as many off-campus jests in the show as there are off-color ones. That’s because, back in the ’60s, the Club decided to expand its worldview. So when Chief Lester Thamohicans is faced with the prospect of his daughter Pocahotness marrying a woman, he says, “This isn’t Massachusetts.” When a stupid person is discussed, Chicksie Dix says, “Is his middle initial W?” That gets a healthy burst of applause, but Shipstead and Blickstead are equal-time fair, so they also include a slam against John Kerry — though the audience responds to that with no applause and some hissing.

How nice to know that, even in 2005, twenty-something authors are still paying attention to Mae West. Shipstead and Blickstead quote one of her famous sayings (“Goodness had nothing to do with it’) and adapt another (‘Is that a shotgun in your pocket …”) They also reference another blast from the past when Sam Osa says “Love means you never have to wear a sari.” Many young ‘uns may not recognize that parody of a line that all America knew 35 years ago, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” But the novel and film from which it sprang — Love Story, the big book of 1969 and the equally big movie of 1970 — was set in Harvard, so it’s easy to understand why it’s remembered here.

And so it goes: Terms of Frontierment follows the time-honored Pudding formula of:

1. Puns: “Play Keno, Sabe!”
2. Double-entendres: “She loves to pet her beaver.”
3. Anachronisms: “Life sans moi is duller than Chanel without Coco.”
4. Homage to musicals of yore: Someone called The Gay Caballero sings a snatch of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”
5. Pastiche: The Hasty Pudding Show is one of the few places on the planet where you’re guaranteed to hear show music that sounds as if it were written during the Golden Age of Broadway. Derrick Wang has given a sweeping, Elmer Bernstein-like sound to his Wild Western music and has included a nice Richard Rodgers-esque “wrong note” in the title song.)
6. Intentionally cheesy choreography, in “Manifest My Destiny.”
7. And, of course, men dressed as women, especially for the de rigueur kickline.

Budding musical theater writers are always encouraged to adapt a play, novel, or movie rather than write a completely original musical, for while adapting is difficult, starting from scratch is much harder. Yet year after year after year, intrepid novices somehow manage to create an original script and an original score, which is more than we can say for shows currently at the Palace, O’Neill, Rodgers, and Winter Garden. I’m already looking forward to the 158th Hasty Pudding Show.

Then on Wednesday, I went to the Shubert Theatre in New York, where I saw another Hasty Pudding Show called Spamalot. That’s what it is, you know: A nice, sophomoric, puerile musical that’s going to bring a great deal of pleasure to a great many people in the ensuing decade, because it has:

1. Puns (Chopped-off arms are there when a passer-by is recruiting “Alms for the poor.”)
2. Double-entendres (A knight says, “She’s got huge” — but interrupts himself to indicate breasts, leading us into thinking a lewd thought, before he changes course and completes the sentence with “tracts of land,” making it seem as if we’re the ones with the dirty minds.)
3. Anachronisms (King Arthur asks, “Why do they call this ‘The Middle Ages’ when nothing comes after us?’)
4. Homage to musicals of yore (The knights dance like the Jets in West Side Story)
5. Pastiche music. (Here’s where Cambridge and Manhattan truly converge: “The Song That Goes Like This” goes in the exact same musical direction that was paved in 1972 by Norman Siegel in The Wrongway Inn. That was the 124th Hasty Pudding Show, which featured a song that Barry Harman — who’d later write Olympus on My Mind and Romance/Romance — called “My Man is Like the Dregs in My Cup.”)
6. Intentionally cheesy choreography (Twice, there’s a silly chorus of tap dancing knights.)
7. And, of course, men dressed as women, though not necessarily or solely for the de rigueur kickline.

As expert as the Frontierment cast is, Spamalot‘s is better still, and so is everything else on stage at the Shubert. But it’s still a spoonful of the same pudding. Fart jokes? Sure, but Spamalot does them better — or worse, depending on your point of view — for it includes many jokes about incontinence. And the performers don’t just break wind; they break the fourth wall. On three separate occasions, a character chides the orchestra conductor. Later, a spectator is dragged out of the audience and brought on-stage.

Show business in-jokes also abound. Sara Ramirez does a Liza impersonation and then segues into playing a white performer who soulfully sings like a black one, right down to a pain-filled grimace when she delivers a particularly difficult passage. Later, Ramirez gets angry when the spotlight operator is late in illuminating her; even after he gets on the ball and bathes her in white, she still holds a grudge and glares at him with hatred. And how about this show-biz joke: When Arthur mentions “Excalibur,” an unseen chorus sings the word over and over again as everyone on stage looks confused and starts searching to see whence the sound is emanating. As Ethan Mordden wrote in Open a New Window, when discussing this same formula joke that was used in the 1962 show A Family Affair, it’s “a musical comedy jest so old that your great-great grandmother fell out of her cradle laughing at it.”

Yet the audience at the Shubert almost fell out of their seats at this tidbit and plenty of others. Why did everyone laugh like seals all night long, from the first hint of a joke till the last? I suspect that people saved up their laughter for decades while Broadway was overwhelmed by mega-musicals. How many jokes did they hear during the British invasion? There’s one funny lyric in Cats (“let the cat out of the bag”), one funny line in Sunset Boulevard (“Did he read the script?”), one amusing song in Les Miz (“Master of the House”), one somewhat comical song in Miss Saigon (“The American Dream”), and no humor at all in The Phantom of the Opera, unless you consider “Prima Donna” a laff-riot. Audiences were so long starved for laughter that they now roar at any attempt at humor, and it’s interesting that many of the jokes they’re laughing at are being made at the expense of the once-beloved mega-musicals. One song begins, “Once in every show, there’s a song like this.” It’s written in the style of the power ballads that audiences took all too seriously for years, from Jesus Christ Superstar to Jekyll & Hyde to Jane Eyre. And when Arthur is told, “You must put on a musical — but not an Andrew Lloyd Webber one,” the line gets even more applause that did the quip about George W. Bush in Terms of Frontierment. The audience also cheers a deft parody of a Golden Age musical, one that’s back on Broadway right now, but. I interpret that as a sign of affection.

So I’m not really complaining about Spamalot, in which cheerleaders suddenly show up unexpectedly and have a pep rally, and in which God (yes, that God) appears and speaks colloquially. When the superb cast members took their well-deserved curtain calls and reprised “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” at the end of the performance that I attended, I was reminded that Broadway is helping a post 9/11 world enjoy itself.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]