Most seniors' these require hours spent in the depths of Widener stacks and slaving away at a Mac in total isolation.

But Todd J. Fletcher '91 has been able to escape the dry and lonely world of academic research.

Instead, the Music and Dramatic Arts special concentrator chose a "hands-on" approach to his senior thesis. Fletcher's thesis project is the upcoming musical, "The Errols."

A Full-Scale Production

Set in North Carolina in the 1930s, the musical, inspired by the novel "Little Lord Fauntleroy," tells of the reconciliation between a mulatto teenage boy with his white grandfather. More than 20 years before the play's story begins, the boy's grandfather refused to recognize his white son's marriage to a Black woman. Now, the Black woman, Elizabeth, and her 18-year-old son, Cedric, leave New York for North Carolina, because the ailing grandfather wishes to meet his grandson.

It was in Lowell Professor of the Humanities William Alfred's playwriting course two years ago that Fletcher found inspiration for "The Errols" and support for his musical thesis.

The current project was composed, directed and orchestrated by the senior. "It started off as just a few songs and then developed into this musical," Fletcher says.

After composing songs based on the "Little Lord Fauntleroy" story for Alfred's course, Fletcher more fully developed some of the ideas he had worked on in class: he added lyrics, developed characters and changed the setting of the story.

"In tutorial I just decided there was something missing--an immediacy, kind of," Fletcher says about the setting of the original story. "What did I know about England in the 19th century?"

"It just became more meaningful for me when I moved it to the South," he says.

And then it was just one more step to a full-scale production.

"I figured since I wrote it, I might as well produce it. But it makes it that much more difficult," he says. "It's not only an activity, It's my thesis."

A Thesis, But A Bearable One

But the "activity" part makes the "thesis" aspect more bearable. After all, Harvard students usually become involved in activities because they're enjoyable. Fletcher's project is no exception.

In particular, Fletcher says he enjoys the show's racial diversity. "Half of the people in the show are black; half are white," Fletcher says. The musical includes both a Black chorus and a white chorus. "When they sing together, it's very powerful," he says.