The cast of the 123rd Varsity Show pose with Columbia’s most famous statute (the one not by Henry Moore)

Tuesday evening, the cast of the 123rd Varsity Show presented a variety of songs and scenes in the Diana Event Oval to preview its upcoming performance. Columbia theatre veteran, theatre-connoisseur, and now Guest Writer Alexandra Warrick writes her thoughts and critiques of the preview, edited by the Arts Editor.

Campus theatre at Columbia can be likened to a sack of candy.  You’ve got the butterscotch of King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe’s sagas – dense, long-lasting, and your grandparents love them; you’ve got the Pop-Rocks of Columbia Musical Theatre Society productions – crackling, effervescent and sometimes a little much.  Columbia University Players is a mystery-wrapper lollipop – you really never know what you’re going to get each semester – and Latenite Theatre has to be liquor-filled bon-bons (with maybe more liquor than bon-bon).  There’s truly something for every ticket-holder’s tastes here at CU.

Which brings us to the Varsity Show, Columbia’s long-standing performing arts spectacle musically riffing on our University’s basket of quirks.  The Varsity Show – which has stuck around since 1894 and continues to forge ahead – is a bar of chocolate: it’s generally crowd-pleasing, dependable, and toothache-sweet.  It can accommodate any number of flourishes – you can throw some crunch in there, some spice – but no matter how you dress it up or deconstruct it, it’s still going to be a chocolate bar.  It’s great if you’re in the mood for it, but you pretty much know going in what you’re going to find under the wrapper.

The West End Preview of the 123rd Annual Varsity Show is its traditional mini-revue of a handful of out-of-context scenes that only lightly graze its top-secret plot – in other words, the Preview is by no means fully indicative of the finished product we’ll experience in April.  That said, it was pretty easy to glean the tone the team aimed for this go-round: staunchly traditional.  One understands that writing the show is naturally a balancing act – don’t stay too safe, but don’t frolic too far from the tried-and-true – so one gives writers Amelia Arnold (BC ‘17) and Mark Lerner (CC ‘18) credit where it’s due.  However, will they write a Veesh that’s dependable but not defanged, bouncy but not bloodless?  After this enjoyable but uneven preview, it’s a tough call.

At the top of the show, we are greeted by a gruff, gravelly emcee in Public Safety VP James McShane (an engaging Jacob Kaplan, CC ‘20), who, in true Officer Krupke fashion, warns us of the insidious “animalis[m]” of the footloose, if not fancy-free, Columbia students tainting his fair institution; this framing device heavily hints at what may be the main thrust of this year’s Varsity Show (as with many that have come before): the Man vs. Those Damn Kids.  Rather than settling into pastimes like “Yahtzee over yogurt pretzels,” the whippersnappers want sex!  They want drugs!  They want…elaborate dance breaks!  A winning meta-wink, wherein Kaplan compares musical theatre choreography to doing whippets, indicates a refreshing self-awareness that helps carry a lot of the moments in this Preview; after all, there’s no way a full-tilt musical interlude about Surf-N-Turf Day at John Jay can fly without being cut with at least a little bit of irony.  (A bon mot?  A cast member hoists a plate aloft and marvels at “how high the steaks are.”  Ba-dum-tssh.)

For all its cornball-itude, this airy Surf-and-Turf samba opener shows off the Varsity Show’s supremely capable cast, whose unflagging energy bursts from the compressed Diana Event Oval performance space like soda from a shaken can.  Elastic Francisco Alvidrez (CC ’19), sharp Jamie Pawlik (BC ’17), elegant Lauren Wilmore (BC ’20): the movement styles are all over the map, forming a pleasingly heterogeneous corps of dancers. The cast gracefully navigates the requisite wink-nudge mugging, making jargony stumbling blocks like references to the Ivy Snapstory and boat shoes charming, not cheesy. Also impressive is the deft way the cast, tasked with playing the kind of broad stereotypes that are VShow’s bread-and-butter, still find specificity within their caricatures. Julia Dooley (BC ‘20) and India Beer (BC ‘20) offer killer doe-eyed Disney deadpans when they hear screaming behind their East Campus wall; Rachel Greenfeld’s (BC ‘19) acrid flat-affect as an unimpressed pot-smoking partygoer (“Fuck you, bitch!”) does a lot with a little.

As the night presses on, we meet the voice behind the wall: a hapless GS student (a charming Tom Phelan CC ’20) who performs a rhapsodic soft-shoe in Tom’s Diner while crowing about all the promising Morningside capers that lay in store for him.  If you find the ethics of lampooning the trapped man who suffered in an airshaft for hours this February a little dubious, buckle up: the writers truly wring the event dry over the course of the night.  This isn’t the only moment in which the writers endeavor to work in edgier satirical barbs, mind you: by the time the Preview wraps up, we’ve grazed, if only lightly, the racism and clinical depression endemic to the – I quote – “dumpster fire” that is Columbia.  While I did cackle at the owner of a Fjallraven backpack being slapped in the face, very few gags truly shocked; then again, it’s the Varsity Show, not The Aristocrats.  Once again, you know what you’re in for.

All in all, this year’s Varsity Show West End Preview reminded me of the wide-eyed, school-spirited joys of Freshman Year – Roar Lion Roar, you guys! –  but it also reminded me a little, to be honest, of my Freshman Year self: theatrical, high-energy, a little extra, genuine but imperfect – but still in progress, of course.  Despite subtle hiccups, there’s a lot to love in this year’s VShow outing, and we should all look forward to catching it this April.

Poster courtesy of The Varsity Show on Facebook