'Commandments' An Uneasy Success

The members of the Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society are bullies.

They want your laughs. They want your money. They want you to forgive them for wanting your laughs and your money. By the end of their 159th theatrica gargantua, “The Tent Commandments,” you will probably have given them what they want—whether you like it or not.

Directed by Tony Parise, with music by Mark P. Musico ’07 and a script by Warland “Trey” L. Kollmer ’07 and Josh C. Phillips ’07, “The Tent Commandments” is a fast-paced spectacle par excellence. Puns! Sex jokes! Glitter! Rhyming! Sex jokes again! Yes, it may get a little tiresome, but no opportunity goes unexploited.

With an unbelievably talented cast and an imaginative production team, the show—which runs through March 18—is truly an overwhelming experience. The plot centers on the rivalry and subsequent unification of two circus troupes (the conventional “Big Tops” and the positively perverse “Freaks”), but it’s more an excuse for the aforementioned puns and glitter than an integral part of the show.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s well suited to the astonishing costumes, extended dramatic asides, and exciting, well-oiled song and dance numbers that are the bread and butter of any Pudding production.

Choreographer Karen Pisani strikes the perfect balance between complexity and the obvious. High heels and all, the cast deftly spins, cartwheels, and taps its way into each new sexually suggestive configuration. “Circus Tricks” and the clown-kickline finale are particular highlights.

Likewise, the cast lacks a musical weak link. Aside from some fairly distracting microphone problems, the harmonies and diction were delivered clearly. Thomas R. Compton ’09 easily has the best voice in the cast as the romantically frustrated, three-breasted “Lotta Boobies” (get it?!). His forlorn lament “A Lotta Love” ranges from passages of delicate melodicism to “Stand and Deliver”-level force.

But “The Tent Commandments” is a show lucky to have the actors it does. If it had a different, less entertaining cast, some less attractive features of the production might not be able to fly under the radar. Like the fact that many of its jokes bomb. Or the fact that when jokes based on stereotypes aren’t funny, they’re quite offensive.

The worst of these stereotypes is the character of Ai Swallow, a female Japanese wannabe Samurai played by David J. Andersson ’09. He does what he can, but at some point the sword twirling, cries of “Samurai Chop,” and bowing add up to a critical mass. His duet with romantic interest Will U. Bullowme (David W. Ingber ’07) is the show’s low point.

For instance: “I like that you kooky / And into kabuki / Though things might get tricky / I want my rice sticky.”

Get it?

Ella Fintzgerald (Benjamin K. Kawaller ’07) is another such character, an elephant who is clearly a fat, loud, black woman who stomps around yelling and just loves fried food.

I want to be perfectly clear: I am not calling anyone a racist. It’s an accusation that gets thrown around too often on college campuses, and there is no evidence of malicious intent at any point during “The Tent Commandments.” Many college students might even argue that, given these conditions, the Pudding show is harmless, pointing to characters like Borat.

It is true that Sacha Baron Cohen makes anti-Semitic jokes all the time without coming off like an anti-Semite, and it’s not simply because he is Jewish himself.

Yet any audience can tell that Baron Cohen’s anti-Semitic jokes are worth more than the little slapstick gags that pepper his routines. Borat in thong underwear may be designed to get a few chuckles, but when an enraged Kazakh crowd yells “Kill the Jew-egg before it hatches!” the laughs are enormous. Unlike the more benign jokes in his routines, Borat’s anti-Semitic ones are designed to provoke.

This is not the case in a production like Hasty Pudding Theatricals 159, where the audience wants to leave satisfied—not challenged—and where every joke has the same goal: to make some portion of the audience chuckle. There’s no discernable difference between puns on someone’s “cannon-BALLS” and Ai Swallow’s mixed up r’s and l’s. And when neither joke is particularly funny, things start to get uncomfortable.

Which is not to say that some members of the cast don’t make the rapid-fire, “all jokes are created equal” formula work very well. As Rhett E. Aimfire, a Machiavellain Frenchman with an ego as outrageous as his Napoleonic costume, Michael B. Hoagland ’07 is great. Using his wiry frame to great effect, and always turning with a flourish of his glittering cape, Hoagland’s humor is terrifically focused, less concerned with cueing the audience for laughs than making sure there is something worth laughing at.

And as Big Top Ringleader Barney Munbailey, William B. Polk ‘09 wields a trio of phobias—clowns, midgets, Nazis—like a malfunctioning gun in an episode of Loony Tunes. In combination with more than a few jokes that came out of nowhere, Polk’s fears make for the evening’s most surprising comedy.

And these surprising jokes are something of a relief, because elsewhere in “The Tent Commandments” the gags are so predictable and relentless that they’re a little passive-aggressive, or perhaps even aggressive-aggressive, kind of like getting mugged for your applause. Whether or not that’s a good thing is a matter of taste, I suppose.

But whatever you do, make sure you see “The Tent Commandments.” There won’t be a more outlandish theatrical spectacle at Harvard this year, and what are spectacles for if not to be seen?

—Staff writer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.