Wellesley Junior Show

Like most things lovely but unsubstantial, the annual Wellesley Junior Show is short-lived. It comes in a night and is gone in another. To see it is, if not quite pure pleasure (though it borders around 70%), something everyone should go through. You shouldn't knock someone else's religion, unless you've attended a service.

The Junior Show is in all its departments the sole property of the Wellesley Junior Class. This year's production, Freewheeling, was, as always, put together by a corps of committees headed by a Supreme Soviet known as the Cape Committee (Cod, not cloak, they write the show there a few weeks before the start of school), and chaired by Linda Muller.

But the Junior Show is only part of the Junior Show. The institution surrounds itself with intriguing accoutrements--from the demurely bizarre construction of the Alumnae Hall Auditorium to the program filled with class and dorm ads which conceal their identity behind visual puns or signatures hidden almost as well as the "Nina" in a Hirschfield cartoon. If the Show's pace is ever too slow, you can try to puzzle out the ads or memorize the name of the Junior class tree (Crimson king maple).

There was little time or need to do much browsing during this year's show. Short, smoothly paced and staged, one could only regret that the direction was a couple of feet in the air above the material. It was the sort of show where you remember how songs look rather than how they sound.

It was all about a machine. Sensitive young Leonard Cog (Moni Buegeleisen) resists the tyranny of the Brain Cells and their Gestapo, the Ball-bearings (led by Musical Director Liz Robbins), to convert the world-machine from harsh angles to flowing curves through sabotage and quiet confidence. All this requires an awfully large chunk of willing suspension of disbelief. If Leonard's weltanschauung is "smooth, round and beautifully spherical" why can't he and the "well-rounded" ball-bearings live in peace?

Let's not be petty. Plots are not to be paid attention to, anyway. But musical numbers are important. In Freewheeling, these were usually tired in conception but snazzy in production. The songs were of the "here we are telling you what we are" variety in which the lyrics only say what the costuming and choreography are saying better. Thus the show opens with each of the machine parts describing her function in song and mime. Then everybody, of course, sings their various themes ensemble. And we're left with exactly the same impression we had when the curtain opened (except perhaps for a momentary lingering of the movements assigned to the ball-bearings).

From there we go on to all the traditional song-styles of the amateur review -- the sinister tango, the unintelligible patter song, the rock'n'roll parody. The melodies were just not striking enough to break out from their cliches and be heard. Tight, overly simple little tunes, accompanied by only a piano, drums, and a brief, aborted oboe (last year's show had the advantage of a charming flute and steady bass behind the songs), they were too thin to matter much. One song, "What Sort of Man," written by Sharon Stokes, started to move towards a little more richness and subtletly, but ended two minutes too soon.

If most of the music and lyrics, except for some excellent parodies, were perfunctory, the staging and dance (under Director Copper Coggins and head choreographer Jane Michaels) was lively and funny. Most of the best jokes were visual. Shaun Murphy, as Chairman of the Memory Cells of the machine, stumbled onstage supported by a wobbly staff to deliver a glaze-eyed listing of the foibles of Eastern men's schools (this number is a feature of the Junior Show which usually has the same level of tradition and humor to it as the Hasty Pudding's kick-line).

Even the puns and in-jokes were enhanced by the staging. Rather than bearing through the torturous verbalistics that led to "deviate Cong" it was more enjoyable, if not much more elegant, to watch the girl hopping around in the blanket who we are told is dodging the draft. And the audience's favorite in-joke was the placing of a towel under the knees of a girl lying down on an analytic couch. Apparently Wellesley, which takes nothing for granted in its students, requires a course called "Fundamentals of the Body Movement" in which towels under knees have a totemic importance.

The show's script was free-form and quaintly irrelevant. Dialogue digressions aimed at the battered, traditional suckers for satire like TV commercials, college rules, and the President, managed to keep just the right side of boring. But it was close.

Junior Shows (at least the two that I've seen), share something with Leonard's creation, through all their extraneous shenanigans. Their plots about young men against the system always turn a little serious at the end. The shows, with their slightly insecure voices, come out for feeling and beauty and humor and against coldness, arrogance and society's silly demands. And that, too, is beautiful.