ARTSMONDAY: Freshman Musical Conventionally Amuses

“Shady Business” features a tyrannical card-swiper named ‘Dimna,’ impending Expos due dates, late nights in Lamont, and terrible Annenberg food. Sound familiar? That’s the point. The freshman musical is designed to elicit phrases like the “That’s what we always do!” uttered by the person sitting next to me.

By those simple standards, the musical succeeds: it sends up the freshman experience, as well as the clichés of noir, love stories, and numerous other genres, in an incredibly hokey way. But this isn’t a criticism. Nobody is pretending that this is high comedy, or anything but silly fun. Taken on that level, the play succeeds more often than not.

In classic musical form, characters move between song-and-dance and what passes for real life with little rhyme or reason, telling the story (not that story matters that much) of Peter (Rowan R.A. Sheldon ’08), a freshman whose roommate George (Kevin Ferguson ’08) has been kidnapped. He enlists the assistance of the detective Veronica (Nicole A. Buckley ’08) and her associates Yolanda (Alexis M. Pacheco ’08) and Wanda (Diana Y. Wan ’08) to help rescue him. Along the way, we are treated to songs on such topics as Annenberg, the travails of being a male secretary, and the inevitability of love in enclosed spaces.

As it turns out, the culprit is Dimna (Kristin A. Jones ’08), who was apparently pushed over the edge by one lost ID card too many. Saddled into the plot is everything from an escape from a lair under Annenberg to a few mixed-up love stories to the recovery of Bob Dylan tickets, and, of course, a happy ending.

At its heights, “Shady Business” achieves the anything-for-a-laugh lunacy that sends a production skipping merrily over credibility gaps. The appearance of a refugee from “The Oresteia” at the end is a delightful non-sequitur that gets laughs for its sheer randomness, as does the argument that breaks out over who is the main character. In fact, Wan portrays Wanda with a similar flair, acting in an affected way that bears very little relation to any sort of reality, but is over-the-top enough to steal any scene she’s in.

Too often, however, the play prioritizes the mundane over the insane. At times, the play is simply making the same cracks that we’ve all made to each other about dining hall food, messy roommates, and Yale. While the goal often seems to be the groan-snicker of recognition that comes with the umpteenth comment about these constants of life, even in song form the well-worn jokes have gotten somewhat dull from repetition. They often seem obligatory, as if authors Aliza H. Aufrichtig ’08 and Ximena S. Vengoechea ’08 felt duty-bound to include everybody’s favorite punching bags.

The cast, however, delivers the sometimes groan-worthy material with aplomb, throwing themselves into the jailings, cleanings, tangos, water-torture attempts, and unrequited pinings with zeal. As Dimna, Jones struts, saunters, and laughs evilly over her today-the-dining-hall-tomorrow-the-world outlook. As Peter, the hapless roommate of the kidnapped George, Sheldon is adorably overeager in his pursuit of Veronica.

Playing Quagmire and Alex, respectively, the secretaries of Veronica’s detective agency, Joshua Sharp ’08 and Yin Li ’08 are stuck with the unenviable task of providing the comic relief in a play that is already nothing but. Playing the self-proclaimed main character, Buckley, as Veronica, at times seems unsure whether to play it straight or over-the-top, but ultimately provides a (relatively) stable center for the story.

“Shady Business” is not a play for the ages, but it doesn’t count that achievement among its goals. If slight in both running time and content, “Shady Business” achieves when it functions as an entertaining production—pleasant, if not particularly memorable and amusing, if not uproariously hilarious.