These talented performers will join forces with the Creative team for this year’s VShow:

Principals:

• Eleanor Bray (BC ’14)
• Rebekah Lowin (CC ’14)*
• Alessio Mineo (CC ’14)
• Jenny Singer (BC ’15)
• Sean Walsh (CC ’14)*

Ensemble:

• Patrick Aloia (CC ’15)
• Allie Carieri (CC ’15)
• Ben Goldwater (GS/JTS ’14)
• Gray Henry (CC ’14)
• Jane Kim (CC ’14)
• Devin Lloyd (CC ’15)
• Kaylin Mahoney (CC ’15)

*Cast member in V117

Live, from Roone Arledge Auditorium, it’s the creative team for the 118th Annual Varsity Show! The producers of V117 have just announced the students responsible for creating this year’s edition of the VShow, and their credentials seem pretty impressive.

• Director: Alex Hare, CC ’13 – Director of XMAS! 5 and the upcoming CMTS Musical Revue, and actor in V116 and XMAS! 4
• Writer: John Goodwin, CC ’12 – Writer for XMAS! 4, and actor in V115 and V116
• Writer: Jeff Stern, CC ’12 – Writer for XMAS! 5, and writer/performer in Chowdah
• Producer: Hillary Kritt, BC ’12 – Co-president of Columbia University Players Performing Arts League and the Columbia Musical Theatre Society, and actor in V116 and the upcoming XMAS! 6
• Producer: Ben Harris, CC ’14 – Technical director for V117
• Art Director: Stephen Davan, CC ’12 – Art director for Urinetown, and set designer for V116
• Composer/Lyricist: Solomon Hoffman, CC ’14 – Composer/lyricist for the upcoming XMAS! 6, musical director for the upcoming CMTS Musical Revue, and musical assistant on V117
• Composer/Lyricist: Tareq Abuissa, CC ’14 – Member of Uptown Vocal and the CU Orchestra
• Choreographer: Adrianna Aguilar, BC ’13 – Assistant choreographer for V117, and coordinator of CU Dance Marathon

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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Come April, Columbia is witness to a familiar but slightly strange sight: thousands of students and patrons eagerly line up to fork over their money for a musical theater show. And this all happens in an age when musical theater is about as relevant as a rotary phone. It’s a testament not only to the power of tradition, but to the Varsity Show’s tradition of breaking with tradition. In an old program by the Blue & White, Vijay Iyer charted the impressive history of the Varsity Show. Below, Bwog presents an abridged version, sprinkled with some old- school images we dug up from the library archives. We really enjoyed the preview, and have high expectations for tomorrow’s opening night.

Defying easy categorization, the Varsity Show now hovers somewhere in the gray area between comedic and parodic interpretation of musical theater. But its roots are firmly planted in the song and dance of an era long since past. Paging through one playbill from the show’s early history, you’ll find a cheerful advertisement with a helpful suggestion: “For digestion’s sake, smoke Camels.” Things have certainly changed.

Originally, the Varsity Show was conceived as a fundraiser for Columbia’s athletic program. The first show, “Joan of Arc,” premiered in 1894 with an all-male cast. In its heyday, Varsity Show was a bona fide New York event: it boasted lavishly decorated sets, was staged at venues like the Waldorf-Astoria, and was even covered in the New York Times. And there was plenty to write about—including the work of such luminaries as Richard Rodgers C’23, Oscar Hammerstein C’16, Lorenz Hart, C’18, and Herman Wouk, C’34.

A snapshot of the more than hundred-year span of shows reveals a succession of themes broadly reflective of their respective eras. Varsity shows at the turn of the century recreated lavish exoticized—one might even say Orientalized—visions of the East. “The Buccaneers,” the swashbuckling tale of 1896, was followed in short order by “Cleopatra,” “The Khan of Kathan,” “Made in India” and “The Mysterious Miss Apache.” Starting in 1920 the show moved toward a brand of somewhat more serious humor. Featuring a score by the formidable trio of Rodgers, Hammerstein and Hart, “Fly With Me” was a send-up of the Bolshevik Revolution. The widely praised production began a trend of political satire Vshows. In 1923, Corey Ford penned one of the most famous shows, “Half-Moon Inn,” based on characters from Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, more broadly attacking the anti-intellectualism prevalent in America following World War I. The now eminent (103 year old!) historian, Jacques Barzun, C ’27, continued the tradition with a lofty script for 1928’s “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted.”

For 1929’s “Oh Hector!” an all-male cast re-enacted scenes from the Iliad and the Aeneid, with beefy athletes playing the roles of Andromache, Cassandra and (gasp) Helen. One glance and the audience realized this wasn’t “the face that set sail a thousand ships.” Far from it— in fact by this time, the Varsity Show had become famous for the “Pony Ballet,” a group of Lion gridiron’s finest ferociously rouged and tucked into ill-fitting dresses, who provided a raucous finale for the night’s festivities. Read more…

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.

The Columbia/NYU electronic band Night Eyes, which also recently made a fun flashlight-lit video, released its first EP called “Exhale” yesterday. The first 150 to download it from bandcamp get it for FREE, or you could pay $3.96 for it on iTunes.

While you’re busy downloading, relive last year’s College Walk of Shame (not the one from EC to Broadway). The 2010 Vshow’s soundtrack is now available to download, also 100% free!

Image courtesy of Night Eyes

ROLM PHONE!

For CC ’14er Gabby Beans, last night’s Class Act was a welcome opportunity to, as the 75-page NSOP manual put it, “sit back, relax, and enjoy.” But she found that difficult to do with a thousand little kazoos buzzing in her ears, and the sounds of Michael Bublé inexplicably wafting over the freshpeople-packed room. Her report follows. PS: Write for us! Go to events and tell us what you see! Take pictures, help us with layout, hang out with us, do anything you’re good at. contribute@bwog.com.

After being herded in to Roone Arledge Auditorium like the bright-eyed freshman cattle we undoubtedly are, I encountered, alongside he more conventional event program, and a sporting event calendar, a miniature kazoo. That little kazoo foreshadowed the surreality of what lay ahead.

The performance began with a slideshow featuring a quiz about Columbia and Barnard’s history: SEAS was the “School of Mines”, etc.. Next they dimmed the lights for another slideshow filled with more of that “important” information. I think it’s safe to say that maybe two of our class of over 1,600 actually read this info, as the combination of Michael Buble and the incessant cheering of OLs was not conducive to attentiveness.

The program continued with a skit involving Alma Mater on the phone with Dean Shollenberger. Next followed a surprisingly enjoyable and well-made 50’s style NSOP PSA video. In addition to providing “real talk” about what we new kids can expect from our NSOP experience filtered through a kitschy, “Leave it to Beaver”-esque lens, there was excellent use of the word “willikers.” Things only got stranger from then on. (New!) Basketball Coach Kyle Smith performed what he called “a little 1989 diddy from Public Enemy” and Justin Ifill, CC’06 and Vice President of the Columbia College Young Alumni, beatboxed with alarming proficiency.

However, the highlight of the event, the Varsity Show presentation, truly engaged the audience. Highlights included the opening dance-number replete with admissions letter envelopes and a skit about RAs. Although enjoyable, I found the number involving the boy in love with his phone slightly foreboding (Editor’s note: ROLM phone skit– a Class Act favorite for years! Columbia’s ROLM phones were also featured on This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass). Hopefully in the next week, none of us will be so lonely as to look to an automated voice messaging system for love and attention.

The program concluded with a presentation of the class banners and a procession of the new students down Broadway through the 116th street Gates. The procession meant parading past manic OLs, disgruntled Morningside Heights residents, CUMB, and an especially spirited dude with a killer Jamaican accent.

Even though the OLs seemed genuinely psychotic, I would be lying if I said that it didn’t make me happy to see people so excited for our entry to Columbia. Mr. Ifill said that “before the cyclone begins [we should] make time for some fun.” Class Act was bizarre, but it was most definitely fun. Who knows, maybe next year I’ll be one of those orange clad-maniacs.

Photo Courtesy of the Varsity Show

In one of the most pitch-perfect moments of last night’s Varsity Show, John Goodwin, playing a young CC professor who insists that students call him by his first name and holds his office hours at 1020, declared that “CC is not about reading the great philosophers. It’s about students with different viewpoints coming together to be offended.” Much the same can be said of the Varsity Show’s reputation and past few efforts. But last night, there was no laundry list of jokes to be made and the plot was not carried by stereotypes. V116′s writers chose to focus on the minutiae of our lives and with their extraordinarily talented team of actors and musicians created a simple, memorable show.

Most of what crippled V116′s predecessor (and even its own February preview) healed by the time the actors took the stage last night. The writers delivered a few refreshingly pan-Columbian storylines with more camp than bite: a SEAS senior (Yonatan Gebeyehu) and a Barnard junior (Jenny Vallancourt) find it difficult to fall in love when Public Safety keeps kicking them off South Lawn, and a grad student can’t and won’t find his way in the real world. Read more…

Warning: V-Show producers checked in with Bwog to tell us that tons of people are buying tickets online and not picking them up. If that’s you, you should probably stop by the TIC to pick them up today, or else you will face huge lines before the show. Remember that lines are fairly long to get into the actual auditorium. Bwog helps you save time!

Bwog crowded into the mystical back room of Havana Central to see the preview of The 116th Annual Varsity Show.

Alex Hare, Jenny Vallancourt, Yonatan Gebeyehu, and Chorus

Upon receiving an invitation to a student production, every administrator must blanch with fear. Given the last two Varsity Shows’ penchant for administrative caricatures, it’s a wonder Deans Shollenberger and Denburg showed up at all. But there they were, in the front row, ready to witness yet another show hosted by and centered around administrators and their personal struggles.

Thank goodness, then, for the one-liners: these were the highlight of the evening. Our favorite character, an over eager CC’er played by Pat Blute (V115‘s Quigley), can’t help but spoil the end of every CC book for the rest of the class: “I read Matthew…you won’t believe what happens to Jesus!” The scene perfectly captured the the frustrations and absurdities of the Core, with the professor giving a perfect grad student nod and assuring us, “If you stay an academic like me, the real world is just a show on MTV!”

A gold star must be given to perennial favorite Yonatan Gebeyehu as our oft-forgotten mascot Roar-ee. His powerful voice and expression-filled face carried the opening scene and we look forward to seeing his character develop in the real show. The talented Jenny Vallancourt sashayed and waggled her eyebrows as she read a meal plan-like e-mail from Denburg using the voice that most of us imagined in our heads.

Alex Hare nailed Shollenberger’s (“Please, call me Kevin”) awkward chuckle and informed a delighted crowd of his hair product of choice (Pomade). Hannah Kloepfer stormed onto the floor as a Miss Gulch-like Denburg, taking the audience by surprise, and proceeded to chastise Shollenburger for trying to win student opinion with offers of free food.

And that seemed to be the plot focus: Dean Shollenberger is trying to connect with students but only knows how to do so by offering free food. His character could have been any generic administrator trying to understand student culture (who really knows him personally anyway?). Hare and Kloepfer set up the age-old V-Show formula of a domineering administrator and a few old souls just trying to do the right thing.

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First we head East for Harlem For The Holidays, a new bazaar-like holiday marketplace that features unique businesses from the neighborhood. (NY1)

After that we head down to New Jersey, which, in terms of gay marriage, now has a chance to distance itself from New York. A metaphorical distance, of course. (1010WINS)

Next we travel all the way to Rio, where former mayor Rudy Giuliani has been named a security consultant for the 2016 Olympic Games. (Gothamist)

And finally, we return home to find that the Design Team for the 116th Annual Varsity Show has been announced! Congrats to everybody:

• Art Director: Cayle Pietras
• Technical Director: Ajit Pillai
• Set Designer: Stephen Davan

Read more…

Below are the names of the people who will provide you with nonstop humor and campus punditry… while singing! On stage! Congratulations to all.

Here’s the 116th Varsity Show cast:

Alex Hare CC ’13
Ben Russell CC ’12
David Offit GS/JTS ’13
Emily Feinstein BC ’13
Hannah Kloepfer CC ’13
Hillary Kritt BC ’12
**Jenny Vallancourt BC ’11
*John Goodwin CC ’12
*Pat Blute CC ’12
Spencer Oberman GS ’12
Tessa Slovis BC ’13
*Yonatan Gebeyehu CC ’11

* Previously appeared in The 115th Annual Varsity Show
** Previously appeared in The 114th Annual Varsity Show