Of Mines and Men

Hasty Pudding Theatrical #135

Book and lyrics by Michael McClung '83

Music composed by Frederick Frever '83

Directed by Michael Pereival

Music supervised by Peter Mansfield

At the Hasty Pudding Theater through March 23

Look there sa collection of little people over there.

A Hasty Pudding alumnus addressing has Champaign this at last night's opening night of the party.

OPENING NIGHT at the Hasty Pudding Theatrical one big coming out party for the campus's bourgeois gent. I dxedo they quall champagne and hobnob at gala parties before, during and after the performance. They speak of friends and women and money mostly money and several spill champagne on their dates blouses, because it is fashionable. They are in large part the affiliant of the Hasty Pudding past and present. One day they will be Lee or perhaps John DeLoreans but tonight, by showtime, many are besotted. All are happy. Staggering penguins in Cambridge, it is a surreal scene.

They come to the Pudding for several reasons. Some come for the 50 cases of champagne rumored to be provided for the occasion up form 18 last year. Some come, too, to be with their old school buddies on friendly turf. Many come to forget about problems--the economy, the double-digit unemployment that brings lumpertd me throats of the proletariat, the hell of the Mideast and Literature and Arts B-16.

But mostly, truth be told, they come for the show. Times may change, and the Dow Jones average may never cross 1100 after all. But for a month late every winter, year in and year out, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals will provide quality theater, uproarious theater relaxing theater.

This year's production. Of Mines and Men, is as sharp as any Cleverly written and performed, it retains the best parts of Pudding shows past--the quick action, smooth choreography and blunt but nonetheless--their tendency to dissolve midway through to inflict unduly tedious second acts upon audiences who stick around only for the theatrical's famed kick-line finale. And it continue to provide just enough of the Harvard and Pudding in-jokes that Pudding goes relish. This year, for instance, there is a musical reference to Chem 20 and narcissistic puns like: "oh, Gustave, let's not he told nasty," aren't we pudding the cart before the horse?"

OF MINES AND MEN is about money, a 10-degree smit from the past two productions. (Serf's Up and Sealed with a Oudhe both concerned the successful exploitation of peasants by royalists.) The first Western in the Pudding's history, Of Men appropriately concern gold, as a corps of ludierotis converge on Collier's Bluff, a gold-fevered California mining town. As the play's opening number, which had audience members nod in appreciation, succinctly observes:

Gold!!

Hooray for money!

Yippee for gold!