Peace Decorum

Those Hasty Pudding guys sure have a lot of fun. Every year they put on a musical, and some of them have to dress up for the female parts, and old grads come, and there are drinks, and then they go on a tour. Some years the shows are really good, and other years, they're institutions, communal rites whose entertainment value is pretty low unless you're a member of the tribe.

The 114th show, "Peace and Decorum," is a a spoof on the Peace Corps, and it is mostly institution. If you go to see it, you should see it as an event, not as a musical. With a date and a drink (which I badly needed), the evening would be much like watching Harvard lose a football game.

The plot is simple enough. Hampton Hurl, the Director of NATCHURAD (the Peace Corps), receives orders from a relative who is Higher Up that he must personally lead a Corps mission to the tiny island of South Embalmo, PEQ. By foul and fair means, he recruits some volunteers, and flies to the island, where, to his pleased surprise, he soon solves an important South Embalmo problem: men. For, as chief Mama Tia explains, South Embalmo has no males in its population. Idyllic problem-solving days pass, until Hurl learns that Noose Publications is planning a feature on the Corps and its work on the island. To impress Noose with the Corps and to save his official neck, Hurl tries to persuade the islanders to build a bridge. And so it goes, a series of ingenious ideas not executed very well.

Certain actors deserve much better than this show. David Rawle's Mama Tia, for example, proves overpoweringly that men can do anything better than women. Mama Tia has a great Amazon's body and a Tallulah Bankhead voice, and watching her bump and grind out a twisty number called "Razzle-Dazzle" is clearly the evening's treat. Rawle's voice, his enormous toothy smile, and his big cynical eyelids allow him to deliver the flattest sort of lines in a devastatingly funny manner; and he props up whole scenes simply by his presence.

Another capable singing actor is Peter Gesell, playing the lead role as Hampton Hurl. Unhappily, he has to carry the burden of much of the dialogue, and his part suffers for it. In the second act, though, he breaks loose from the stale and the hackneyed, and the result is pleasing in at least two songs, "Think Right" and "My Friend the Jug."

And Chips Janger, as Jack Snow, a rake who joins the Corps for his own reasons, is smooth talking and a graceful dancer. (The rest of the acting and singing ranges from undistinguished to lousy.)

But if three important roles are solid, the skeleton of Peace Decorum is not. Walter Moses' music is uneven: "Wander Lust," some of his "Ballet" and, of course, "Razzle Dazzle" are just fine, but scarcely memorable or even nice to hum. Alan Lutkus' lyrics are competent, but often inane, and they don't follow Carter Wilson's book too closely.

Which is perhaps a good thing, since the book is terrible. Jokes about the Kennedy family, sneers at Time, and a couple of anti-FDR cracks that haven't been heard around Harvard for some years--these are not inherently funny things. Nor are puns, hairy-legged kicklines, topical names like Ev and Charley, liquor, or sex, automatic laff riots. You have to work hard to make material like this fresh, and Wilson hasn't.

Director David Tihmar (who also did the choreography) has paced the show rather nicely, and manages, for the most part, to control the swarms of bosomy Pudding members that fill his stage. Once or twice, though, the number of people move about confusingly while a song or dialogue is going on; and a horseplay scene where the Corpsmen and the tribeswomen build a bridge is unnecessary.

When things onstage got a little slow, I listened to the little band in the pit, which is good; it can play hot and cool, and its arrangements of the dullest songs are snappy. (Alan Lutkus, by the way, plays saxophone and clarinet.)

People in the audience seemed to enjoy Peace Decorum, and I can understand why: if you look at it as an event, the 114th of its kind, if you take a date and a drink or two, if, in short, you look on it as a Pudding Show and not a musical, then you might too. I didn't.