A Quarter Century Later, Founders Reflect On the Froshical
It all started with a flyer. Former Crimson editor Dara Horn ’99 sat with three friends in the basement of the Freshman Union — then the equivalent of Annenberg, but known today as the Barker Center — when she spotted a piece of paper that read, “Come try out for The Real Class of ’98.”
To this day, she isn’t quite sure what the flyer referred to, it sparked an idea for a play centered around one class. Twenty-four years later, this production would be an annual phenomenon and staple of the freshman theater community known as the “Froshical.”
One month into her freshman year, the notion that a group of freshmen could work on their very own theatrical production, without the interference of upperclassmen, intrigued Horn. At the time, she had been rejected from “literally every competitive creative organization,” she recalls.
And she wasn’t alone. Her eventual co-founders, Michelle Chen ’99 , Peter G. Chan ’99, and Jessica Hammer ’99, were under similar circumstances. “We knew a lot of people who were frustrated,” remembers Hammer.
The members of the original team met each other during the First Year Arts Program (FAP), a pre-orientation program for artistically-inclined freshman. In FAP, Horn says, she had found a space where she felt the creativity of the freshman class could blossom. The fall semester, by comparison, was a letdown: The competitive, hierarchical nature of Harvard’s extracurricular activities meant that students like Horn, who were eager to take on creative roles but lacked the necessary seniority or experience, were relegated to the the bench.
In response, the four students decided to put on a musical solely involving first years with the hopes of preventing a system of hierarchy where people were forced to “work their way up” as underclassmen.
Initially, the group didn’t think that much would come from it. They printed posters that read, “No comp. Free snacks. Come try out for the Freshman Musical” and pasted them around campus, hoping to garner at least a bit of interest. To their surprise, on the day of the first meeting, people did come — so many that the Canaday common room could barely accommodate them.
The final production, which both Chan and Horn estimated involved between eighty and one hundred first-years, was titled “Shakespeare in the Yard.”
While later productions would typically take the form of cohesive two-act musicals, “Shakespeare in the Yard” consisted of a series of scenes from Shakespeare plays, adapted to the first-year experience at Harvard. There was no one book-writer, director, or lyricist; the play was the collective effort of dozens of first-years who were willing to contribute bits and pieces of their time.
According to Hammer, the prevailing attitude amongst its creators was, “Why not? Let's try it, and let's find out what we don't know by doing it. And let's find out who we are as creators through the process of making.”
In retrospect, she thinks a large part of the four’s ability to move forward on the project actually lay in their relative inexperience. “Ignorance was maybe not bliss, but it was the willingness to take a risk,” she says. “In retrospect, that was great, because if we understood the full consequences of lots of the things we do, we'd be terrified.”
And the end product, performed in April of 1996 in Agassiz House Theater, was, according to Horn, “kind of amazing.”
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Nearly a quarter-century later, the First-Year Musical operates a little differently.
The process of change began the next year, when the musical became an established, annual event. “We basically started from scratch,” says Yoon-Ho A. “Alex” Lee ’00, an executive in that year’s musical. “We applied to be an officially recognized organization with a budget and a bank account, all of that.” The tradition of each creative team choosing its successors via a written application and interviews also began with the class of ’00.
While seemingly contradictory to the “no comp” attitude taken by Froshical’s founders, Chloe E.W. Levine ’22, lyricist and co-vocal director for last year’s First-Year Musical, maintains that the founding ideology of making art accessible is still very much alive. Levine acknowledges that an eight-person executive team is limiting, “but it’s really just a core basis for everything else,” she says. “Any person who approached us and said they wanted to be involved in Froshical could be, no questions asked.”
This year, some of the logistical strain on the Froshical production team has been alleviated. For the first time in the musical’s history, the Office for the Arts (OFA) will facilitate its production. This change means that the student team will have easier access to funding and a guaranteed spot in the Agassiz Theater’s Spring season. The OFA is also planning to host a series of supplemental master classes on musical theater performance and production for freshman.
“[It’s about] giving them the tools that they need to feel confident about the product they’re creating,” says Dana E. Knox, OFA Production Coordinator and first-year musical faculty advisor.
Chen, Hammer, Chen, and Horn had no idea that the project they started in a Canaday common room in 1995 would become a longstanding tradition, and they seemed thrilled to hear that it is still a part of the freshman experience. Still, the competitive nature of the musical today raises questions. “Where is the place that people can try on these new roles? What is the opportunity for people who don't think of themselves as experts to take on roles in the theater community that may shape their lives in the long run?” Hammer asks. “I hope someone reading this article decides to pick up that challenge.”