Chris Silverberg

Name, Hometown, School: Chris Silverberg, Dallas, Texas, Columbia College.

Claim to fame? Lots of theater and singing on campus, much of it with KCST, The Varsity Show (acted in 117, directed V119), and Nonsequitur. Showing up 10 minutes late to meetings, rehearsals, etc. Skipping whatever it was you asked me to do to do VShow instead. Clogging your news feed with the Chris Silverberg All-Nighter Liveblog™. All that said, at heart, I’m just a Barnard Boy.

Where are you going? Home to Dallas for a while, then back to NYC for a while (depending on how bearable/unbearable I find Texas), then off to England for two years to teach a British boys’ boarding school. I’m practicing my Robin Williams/Sidney Poitier impression right now.

Three things you learned at Columbia:

1. The Circle of Admiration. No matter who you are at Columbia, there is someone that you admire, about whom you think, “wow, I would be so much better/happier/cooler/more interesting/more accomplished/more whatever if I were like that person.” But what you don’t realize is that there is someone that person says the same thing about. And there is someone saying that same thing about you. And so we’re all in a huge circle of inadequacy/admiration, but remembering that we’re all in it together sometimes helps. (By the way, someone once told me that would make for a pretty awesome vshow number. You’re welcome, 120).
   
2. Every experience is a resource, including college/Columbia as a whole, and it’s your right and privilege to take from that resource what you want/need/can gain from it, so long as you aren’t hurting anyone as you do so. At a certain point, I figured out that what I needed from Columbia wasn’t really the intellectual stimulation I got from classes during my first two or three years, and what I needed was to learn how to interact with people better, how to lead people, etc. So I stopped going to class and started directing plays. (Disclaimer for future employers: I mean, I still went to class… sometimes). But I wasted a lot of time feeling bad about that—thank God for the friends who helped me figure it all out.
3. People are really great, and at the end of they day other people are what counts and basically nothing else does, so make sure you put the people around you first and it’ll be hard to screw up too bad.

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More than halfway there! People lucky enough to be done with finals have started leaving already, but probably like most of you, Bwog is still slumped in bed dreaming of Milano sandwiches and about not having to take this exam in two hours. It’s an oral one, do you think we can bring food?

Bwogline: Starting in January, Columbia will begin reimbursing its married gay and lesbian employees for taxes they pay because the federal government does not view their domestic partnerships as an “economic unit.” Looks like the good news just doesn’t stop.

Chorusline: The V-Show has posted the 117th Varsity Show soundtrack on its website! Now you can relive those moments whenever you want, at John Jay…

Finals tip: Copy-paste your thesis statement into every body paragraph verbatim so that your paper will cohere!

For these and more tips, relish in our Twitter.

Stressbustyourself: Masturbate.

Overheard: A youngling, outside of Butler:

“I’m taking a break from studying to eat, but it’s justified because it’s a physical need.”

Priorities are everything!

Merp via Wikimedia Commons

Send us publicity pics when you can k? Tanks!

With a whopping ~$100K budget, it’s understandable that people hold such high expectations for the Vshow. The 117th iteration succeeded in tackling this year’s scandals, but failed to deliver the polished production we wanted. Clocking in at over 2 hours (plus intermission), the show strove for topicality, as it should, and handled sensitive issues tastefully and creatively. Whereas last year’s show cleanly executed a safe story, 117 confronted, if messily, the scandals head-on: ROTC, the drug bust, Epstein—it’s all in there. They packed in a lot, but unfortunately the plot collapsed under its own weight.

The first act devoted too much time to introducing the individual plots strands, and got bogged down tying them all together. So let’s run through the threads: the senator’s love story, his sister’s quest for fame, a boy enrolled at Barnard, ADP’s Four Loko operation/revolution against the War on Fun, POTC undercover policemen, and Ke$ho (more on this later.) Phew. It was an impressive feat to weave them all in, but the whole was ultimately less than the sum of its parts. The show opened with a dedication to sticking it to the Man and overturning the War on Fun, but ended incongruously with a message about being true to yourself. There was no consistent theme driving the story from beginning to end. If you turned in a paper that began with one thesis and ended with a completely unrelated one, you would get a B-. Except in Art Hum.
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QuickTix spreads the mission of the TIC far and wide. Every two weeks we tell who’s buying which tickets, both on and off-campus. Every once in a while, around this time of year, they get a ton of action and the lines in Lerner lobby can get a little hectic. The organizers of the Varsity Show say they encourage you to buy your tickets in advance, especially for tomorrow’s performance, when access to the TIC may be more difficult than usual.

Numbers of tickets left for the Varsity Show (out of a possible 1100!)

Friday: 128
Saturday: 575
Sunday, 2 pm: 846
Sunday, 8 pm: 835

Home Sweet Home (circa 1915)

V117 premieres tonight! Their trailer (as imagined by CUMB) boasts POWER, LUST and Godzilla footage. Check out our review of the preview, and a brief history of the Varsity Show tradition. We’ll see you there tonight!

Spec gets personal and pretty cute with their professors about the meaning of life, sharing their stories from their formative years. (The Eye)

Since you, fair readers, shitted all over our burger review, allow us to defer to Eater’s National Burger Week, a veritable tour de force of burger reportage from across the nation. (Eater)

The filming of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close continues on Riverside Drive (from around 112th to 116th St.) Tom Hanks has wrapped up his portion of the shoot, but you might be able to get a glimpse of Max von Sydow, the famous Swedish actor and star of many Ingmar Bergman films.

Clearly following Columbia’s example, Yale will vote on May 5 whether to allow their students to ensure they will have jobs after graduation by joining ROTC. (Crimson, Bloomberg)

Old Skool via WikiCU

The 117th Annual Varsity Show will run from April 29 to May 1. If it’s anything like the preview, it sounds like it might be worth your while. Get your tickets online or at the TIC before April 14th for the early bird discount! If you’re feeling generous, splurge on a VIP ticket. We’re not quite sure what’s so VIP about it, but if you’ve got the funds, why not? ‘Tis for a good cause—Columbia community-building tradition!

Early Bird Discount through April 14

Priority: $15

Floor: $8

Balcony: $5

Prices after April 14

VIP: $75

Priority: $15

Floor: $10

Balcony: $7

Bwog squeezed in to Havana Central’s backroom for the much anticipated Varsity Show Preview. There was promise, pizazz, and no Operation Ivy League…

Last night’s 117th Varsity Show preview was executed seamlessly, but displayed no awareness of the insanity that went down last semester. Of course, we’re not asking for a laundry list style lampooning of the highlights (or lowlights), but save for one POTUS project reference, you could have copied and pasted last night’s script to fit any other year’s show. Still, we liked it—a lot!—and it seems the rest of the audience agreed.

The show started off strong with a punchy LLC skit, (“the Laughing Loving Center”). Elizabeth Power, CC ’13, perfectly played the over-eager RA. But the script stuck to tried and true jokes pulled from clichéd V-Show scripts of yore: Harlem is scary, international students exist. So do Republicans. But then good ol’ Frontiers of Science Cowboy, played by Sam Mickel, CC ’14, showed up all the way from the “Northwest…Corner Building,” and won us over with his scruffy swag. He served as a clever narrative device linking the otherwise disconnected scenes. Though his Columbia “campfire stories” provided a suitable framework for the short preview, the Frontiersman, even with his spot-on sound effects and corny-cute shtick, probably couldn’t carry a full show.

Then came the real winner: ManDate. The music, featuring a keyboard switched to a tropical vibraphone setting, buoyed the best lyrics of the show. Four guys (Issac Assor, CC ’14, Andrew Wright, CC ’14, Chris Silverberg, CC ’13, and Bob Vulfov, CC ’13) out at a bar fail miserably at picking up girls (“Your hair smells like juice!”), commiserate in four-part harmony, and embrace bromance. We genuinely welcomed the performers’ punny “mandate” to see the V-Show when our favorite tune was reprised in finale.

The next numbers fell short. In “College is Latin for Mistakes,” the Chicago-inspired tango music and animated choreography proved memorable; the content less so. By trying to appeal to universal college experiences, the lyrics lacked the incisive references of last year’s best one-liners (COÖP cult, lawn police). An ADP escapade (“and then we stole a few pineapples from Westside…”), delivered memorably by Alia Munsch, BC ’12, represented more of what we want to see: the specific, unpredictable, yet weirdly relatable.

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The cast of the 117th Annual Varsity Show has been revealed at last! Congratulations, friends!

Cast

• Alia Munsch (BC ‘12)
• Andrew Wright (CC ’14)
• Bob Vulfov (CC ’13)
• Chris Silverberg (CC ’13)
• Elizabeth Power (CC ’13)
• Isaac Assor (CC ’14)
• Naomi Roochnik (BC ’13)
• Rachel Chavez (CC ’14)
• Rebekah Lowin (CC ’14)
• Sam Mickel (CC ’14)
• Sean Walsh (SEAS ’14)
• Victoria Pollack (BC ’12)

Production Team

• Adrianna Aguilar (BC ’13), Asst. Choreographer
• Amelia Lembeck (BC ’14), Stage Manager
• Elizabeth Logan (CC ’14), Asst. Director
• Emma Ziegellaub Eichler (CC ’14), Asst. Art Director
• Malida Tadesse (CC ’14), Asst. Producer
• Mark Ruddy (CC ’14), Stage Manager
• Michael Hsu (SEAS ’12), Asst. Tech Director
• Yuxi Wang (BC ’13), Publicity Manager

We posted the creative team last month. Check it out here

Gang's all here!

Head over to Low Plaza anytime between now and 4:00 p.m. for free food and giveaways from the V117 Creative Team. The Facebook event advertises free V117 ping pong balls (the perfect addition to your Thursday night!) and Monster (it’s Four Loko minus the fun part!). Bwog suggests you check it out, especially if you’re interested in getting involved in the show.

More jokes about ROLM phones...coming your way this May!

Ta-dahhhh! Your 117th Varsity Show Creative Team. See you in June, friends!

A hearty congratulations to the newest members of V117 and to the V116 retirees.

• Director: Emily Nagel (CC ’12)–V115 Stage Manager, V116 Publicity Manager, and Writer for Xmas! 5.
• Producer: Fiona Georgakis (CC ’13)–Assistant Prodcer for V116 and Producer for CMTS’s Urinetown
• Producer: Martin Willner (CC ’12)–Previously produced Dirty Hands and Pillowman, CU Players President
• Composer/Lyricist: Eli Grober (CC ’13)–Stage Manager V116, Composer Xmas! 5
• Composer/Lyricist: Shira Laucharoen (CC ’12)–Composer Xmas! 5
• Art Director: Antoinette Allen (CC ’12)–Artistic Department for V115 and V116
• Writers: Nuriel Moghavem (CC ’11) and Betsy Morais (CC ’11)
• Choreographer: Sara Miller (BC ’13)–assistant choreographer for V116, choreographer for CMTS’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and a member of Raw Elementz.

Update: Choreographer Sara Miller was accidentally left off the original list.