I'd Rather French-Kiss the Blob

THE HASTY PUDDING Show is the kind of thing that lives on its precedents, since no post-Freudian group of undergraduates could begin a routine of dressing up in drag to amuse people. But once the practice can be justified by the past, the show can float merrily along without being subject to serious questions. Still, it is a little odd, or at least surprising, if you divorce yourself from the Harvard context of what-a-funny-example-of-tradition-here.

Some people really don't like it, of course. Rosie Blake, in a mediocre novel about being a 'Cliffie in the early '60s, wrote of seeing her boyfriend in the show, and not being too happy with the whole thing.

In the intermission he came out to the lobby--lipstick, stockings, the whole thing. It wasn't that he looked like a woman, at least I don't think that was it. It just seemed wrong; all the others amused me, but Sanbord [her boyfriend] repulsed me. He was too drunk to notice my reaction, and nuzzled up against me. It scared hell out of me, and I'll never forget it.

Most people don't have quite this perspective on the thing, which brings up the interesting question of why they go to Pudding Shows. It seems pitiful to spend money to see a show like HPT 126 Keep Your Pantheon, and this year's show, as HPT productions go, is good. But it's good within the tradition, and there is more to that tradition than just dressing up in drag--it also means wooden acting, amiable incompetence in the kicklines, slick p.r. (all that Man-of-the-Year stuff), and a certain alcoholic preppiness. There is also a tradition of making bundles of money on the show, enough for everyone to go to Bermuda and to help support the Hasty Pudding Club for another year. That tradition doesn't seem to be in any danger of dying.

It hardly seems that appreciation of the first few strands of the tradition (bad acting, etc.) are enough to make anybody want to support the last one. After all, the Cambridge High and Latin School play is cheaper, and you don't have to get dressed up to go.

But accepting for the moment that something has lured you into Keep Your Pantheon, a semi-valid question remains of what you will see. No one, at least, is under any obligation to take the thing seriously, so the first thing to do is thank God that this is not last year, and that a plot, whatever its faults, exists this year, which is more than could be said for last year's Bewitched Bayou. There is not now and never has been any danger of any Pudding script being printed in an anthology of great plays or musicals, but in some years the demands of writing an original script are harder on the Pudding than in others. This year Mark O'Donnell wrote a script in which the events (oddly enough) have logical antecedents. There is, of course, no character development, suspense or any of that other good stuff. Even so, only a couple of the scenes seem to be totally superfluous.

The plot, what there is of it, involves classical mythology, specifically, Hera's displeasure at Zeus's chasing a girl, Swoedipus. The girl is banished to a desert island, cleverly named Isle of Lucy, from which she is rescued by Androgen, her human lover, after he has consulted various oracles, performed various labors, and, appropriately, suffered. With domineering females made to look stupid, with retarded juvenile and cardboard characters floating around and with the chorus line, the show has what most Pudding audiences like.

Most of the acting is stiff and stock. No one would want the guys in drag to be really capable at female impersonations, but competence rarely threatens the Pudding's stage. David Lewis, as Hera, and Michael Gury, as the Oracle of Housephli and Bulah the maid, are both sure of themselves and appear to have some idea of how to act under utterly farcical conditions. Mark Miller, as Zeus, is mostly a foil for Lewis, and his Nixon imitations were, to say the least, strange in a Pudding Show. Relevance in drag, and in black tie, is always a little suspect, if you know what I mean.

Acting with no character to develop, an odd exercise, becomes a contest in comparative idiocy. The losers on opening night included Rick Hagan as Androgen, Ray Nied as Pritteples, and Steven Kolzak as Swoedipus, though Kolzak was unusual in the cast for having a good voice and being audible. Generally the diction was about as muddy as the Hasty Pudding yogurt served at halftime.

But since no one goes to a Hasty Pudding show for the acting, its irrelevance is transparent. What the audience seems to like, and what the cast seems to sweat from most, is the choreography. The trademark of the show is its kick line, and this year's show has one, of course, dragged kicking into the middle of the second act, in no way integral to the rest of the show--a bizarre but apparently welcome intrusion that would have killed any momentum in the plot (but luckily it had none).

So all of a sudden you get this spoof on the Kilgore Rangers, doing a drum and bugle routine with flags carried like rifles, men dressed in drag imitating women dressed in men's clothes. It becomes hard to follow, which is probably a good thing, since God knows where you'd end up if you followed them wherever they're going.

The dance routines and the music are quite a bit of work, especially considering that, at least as far as the kick line goes, the amount of talent involved is pitifully meager. Voight Kempson, the director, does a lot to compensate for this absence, by a lavish and effective use of mannerisms. The pit band seems more competent, though they tend to drown out some of the weaker voices onstage. The music Jonathan Scheffer and Barry Cohen dreamed up (stole?) for this show is the usual pastiche of everything from Motown to madrigal, with Harry Belafonte thrown in as some sort of transition.

It grows harder to condemn the Pudding Show for its irrelevance, stupider to condemn it for its sexism, and more boring even to think about it in any kind of a serious way. In a better world the show would be sick and degenerate, but in this one it's non-pathological and normal. The show is one of those emminently ignorable things not worth going to unless you've got friends in the cast or something. That this is one of the better shows to come along is hardly going to make 1974 for me, or anyone else. But now that people are swallowing goldfish again, maybe nothing makes much difference.