Blasphemy The Greatest Musical Ever Sung at Dunster House November 19-21

I DON'T LAUGH very much these days. In fact, there've been only two things that made me cackle in recent memory: a line from Levi-Strauss ("... among the Mashona and Matabele of Africa the word 'totem' also means 'sister's vulva,' which provides indirect confirmation of the equivalence between eating and copulation"), and the play by Chris Durang '71 at Dunster House ("Where's Jesus' body?" "Would you believe the Knights of Columbus fervently ate it?").

The Greatest Musical Ever Sung is a wash-your-dirty-dacron pageant based on the life and death and life of Jesus. The melodies are old show tunes like "There's No Business Like Show Business" fitted to ecclesiastic lyrics. ("Hello, Dolly!" is somehow rendered as "Hail, Mary!") All the nastiness that anyone might have dreamed of perpetrating while whittling away Sunday mornings in blue-lit religious classes is right there on stage; in fact, at several points during the show, one had the uncanny feeling that You-Know-Who would have turned over in His You-Know-What if the K. of C. hadn't already gotten to Him.

Which brings us to the not-so-funny issue of blasphemy. It is quite conceivable that many people will be offended by The Greatest Musical: when the father of Christ sings a number like "St. Joseph's Children's Aspirin," it's difficult to cling to traditional notions of sanctity. But this is House drama, produced at a Harvard House. That Harvard is not the same as the real world seems fairly certain at this point. Do things that happen at Harvard also happen simultaneously in the real world? Probably not, and the resulting shared-dirty-joke shawl which protectively envelops Coop rebates embarrassing WHRB-broadcasted speeches at Faculty meetings, and the President of the University's press releases is also the shawl that makes the Virgin's energetic screams of labor pain the object of unerring, honest delight.

Ellen Berman's sensitive Ethel Merman-like portrayal of the Blessed Mother is one of the strengths of the show. She takes snapshots at the Last Supper, genuflects compulsively after the Resurrection, and belts out "The Dove that Done Me Wrong" -she says of her unborn Child, "Well, it'll either be some sort of strange bird, or the Savior of the World" -with an eerie operatic raunchiness. Kay Tolbert's Mary Magdalene is a good-natured whore; her number, "You Can't Get a Man with a Prayer" ("God is just an abstraction/I need a little action "), places her metaphysically about midway between Wittgenstein and Melina Mercouri. And Kathy Allyn's Elizabeth, a pregnant nonagenarian, is firmly and humorously controlled.

THE STAGING, though, is vintage eleventh grade. In spite of Dennis Roth's set (including an imaginative ersatz stained glass window by Steve Baumgart), members of the cast constantly upstage one another, and company choreography is usually little more than spastically synchronized swaying. Tiny patches of the show are memorably wretched: unfunny anachronisms, offensive chatter about Harvard, a gratuitously swishy Wise Man, songs with three too many verses, and lines whose meter is often humanly impossible to navigate. Many of the supporting roles are weak, and some of the numbers are simply duds.

But it's a funny, funny play, and you'll probably laugh yourself silly. "The Vatican Rag" has long been one of my favorite spoof songs, and The Greatest Musical Ever Sung shares (if only fitfully) much of its vigor. If you still take your eucharist seriously, go to the Prudential or something; if not, there's still time to hear the Pharisees do a splendid barbershop quartet. Yuks per minute, its a lot easier going than Levi-Strauss.