Jungle Belles

Hasty Pudding Theatricals #136

Book and Lyrics by Anthony Calnek

'84 and Alison Taylor '84

Music by David Chase '86

Directed by Michael Percival

Musical Direction by Roger Grodsky

At the Pudding through March 21

"Callest thou that thing a leg" --Alfred Lord Tennyson   "The Vision of Sin"

ACOUPLE OF YEARS AGO my parents came up for a March weekend and I ran out of places to take them, so we all went to see the 134th Hasty Pudding Show I figured they would enjoy a little traditional Harvard color and it didn't occur to me to check any of the shows' past titles, like the one they picked in 1972. The Wrong way Inn Several minutes, and more than several anal compulsive jokes into the show. I was afraid to look to my left or right. But when I got home for spring break three weeks later and the show was safely off to Bermuda, my parents were still guffawing and even repeating the jokes to their often embarrassed friends. Never underestimate the Pudding.

Never, in particular, underestimate the diamond studded bacchanalia that is the Pudding show's opening night Especially if you aren't used to counting your champagne bottles by the square yard and pushing your way between velvet shoulders and clustered TV cameras just to see other people ogling Man of the Year Sean Connery. It could be considered decadent or glamor-mad, a bit peculiar--the audience's vast delight in hairy cleavages and falsetto love scenes--or, in years when the show is lousy, altogether pointless.

All these things might be true. No matter. The audience will have a good time, maybe the best time they are likely to have all winter. If it happens to be a year when the good old Pudding formula has gone stale--if the dancers can't dance and the plot falls apart after the curtain-raiser--well, the opening night crowd will have a blast just the same. They'll just drink a little more.

Not this year, though, for Jungle Belles--a musical about "the real women of the '80s"--is one of the strongest Pudding shows in recent years, an extravaganza which delivers all the traditional payoffs and even manages to add some new spices to the recipe.

As usual, the Theatricals deliver a wildly campy script crammed with puns, double-entendres and Harvard references, and a dozen or so men in ornate female clothing rush around onstage and do the bump and grind. (Since this year is an Amazon theme, we also get a bonus on chest hair.) And also as usual, Act I contains rudimentary plot development, sexual innuendo, and jokes about Harvard administrators in the audience--a spectacle immediately preceded by the opportunity to watch the HPT producers humiliate a smiling celebrity with Man of the Year honors. (Sean Connery didn't lose his cool when Gail Aidinoff crowned him with a curly black wig and two busty men kissed his cheeks, and he didn't crack up when co-producer Tom Strickler forgot what movies he had been in. The audience did, but that's the kind of thing people go to live presentations for.)

Act II contains a couple of show-stopping numbers, sexual innuendo, a veritable pun orgy, and a kickline or two. Add a lot of champagne, most of it brought in fistfuls from the pre-performance cocktail party, and the hilarity begins to make--well, not sense, but something close to it.