A Forum Affair

John Berman, David Javerbaum

Chip Rossetti

directed by Greg Minahan

at the Hasty Pudding

How do you review a Pudding show? There's not a lot to compare it to. The Pudding is a genre of its own; where else would 16 guys dress up in drag, spout scads of puns, vamp around stage for a couple of hours, and end up high-heeled and scantily clad, dancing in a kickline lifted straight out of Radio City?

Which is, of course, exactly what the cast of the Hasty Pudding The articles does in its 146th production, "A Forum Affair." This year's high-budget, high-priced extravaganza takes us to Ancient Rome, where the fraternities hold jeans and t-shirt parties and the royal spectators at the Colosseum sit in the Caesarean section. get it?

Ancient Rome--with a few side rips to Egypt--makes terrific fodder for Pudding material. If all else fails, after all, you can throw in a Roman numeral joke: "Take V," the taskmaster tells his crew. Or a hieroglyphic joke "Feather before squiggly line except after bird."

Because in addition to the vamping and crooning, the sexual innuendoes and the Wellesley jokes the Pudding is first and foremost about bad puns. That and anachronisms (look for an American Gladiators dumbbell and a Barney lunchbox). And meta references ("It's the best dialogue I've had since Scene Two." one character says).

"Plot?" That's just another Greek word.

To review the Pudding, then, you've go to take it for what it is. So: are the puns bad enough? In a word, yes. Are "the anachronisms fitting enough? "Is the Pope gonna be Catholic?" Are the vamps vamp enough? They do their high heels proud. Is the script meta enough? it you ask me, there's no such thing as too much meta. And my opinion counts, since "I'm the reviewer.

The script, by David Javerbaum '93, Chip Rossetti '93 and John S. Berman '95, is loosely, loosely, vaguely about intrigue and attempted murder in Ancient Rome and Egypt. Really, though, the would-be plot isn't much more than an excuse for a set of broadly drawn characters with funny names.

There's Claudia Wayop (Skip Sneeringer '94), who wants to make her boorish husband Crassus Canbee (J.C. Wolfgang Murad' 95) successor to Emperor Pompey Circumstance (Stephen P. Lucado' 94). (Claudia Wayop. Get it?)

There's Pompey's conservative sister, Electra publicans (Aaron R. Zelman '95), and her Yale-educated slave Lucinda Lipps (J.P. Anderson '95). (She's Yale-educated, and she's a slave Get it?) They scheme to get Electra's airheaded daughter, Caesonia Phase (Adam D. Feldman '95) interested in the would be successor to the Roman throne, nerdy Nero Sited (Thomas F. Giordano '96).

There's Nero's ravenous tutor, Plato Pasta (Berman), who's busy planning his ideal Republic "with room for everybody...except for them frigging Corinthians." There's Plato's love interest Medusa Pade (Andrew Burlinson '97), a love-starved gorgon with killer head of hair.