Sing A Song of Morningside

By Thomas J. Vinciguerra C'85, J'86, GSAS '90

8:04 P.M. THE LIGHTS DIM. A rustle of murmurs and programs.

Darkness ... a few moments of suspended reality.

Overture. Up curtain. Up music.

Lights! Noise! Dancing figures who, even as the eyes try to take in the spectacle, proclaim their presence:

The lines are long at the registrar's,
The pub café and at campus bars;
We live with lasting mental scars
From lectures packed like subway cars!

We are the caped crusaders of the campus scene,
The monkey wrench of the bureaucratic machine;
And if you think that we're not too polite,
Or that we're picking a fight,
Well, you're probably right!

The words date from the recent past, but the spirit is timeless. It is the Columbia Varsity Show, all 111 years of it.

Calling the Varsity Show an undergraduate musical comedy and leaving it at that is like calling the Bill of Rights a list, or saying that Socrates talked a lot. The Varsity Show is an institution of Ivy-entwined heritage, as much a part of Columbia as the Light Blue, Van Am, and Hamilton Hall. It is a chronicle of lives and times on both sides of the 116th Street gates, and its thespian clutches have traditionally ensnared the College's most lyrical talents. 

Over the course of a century and a decade, the Varsity Show has constituted a virtual palimpsest of Columbia. Simultaneously celebratory and derisive, the show reveals in skit and song the student zeitgeist. Everything is up for grabs: pompous classmates, the winds of war, the mayhem that is New York, (un)requited love, the core curriculum, the President of the University and of the U.S.—in short, the sum total of what is on the minds of Columbia's typically intelligent, witty, frightened, jaded, hormone-driven 17-to-21-year-olds.

Along with a few other activities—Spectator, WKCR, Philolexian—the Varsity Show has long occupied a prominent place in the constellation of undergraduate endeavors. In his autobiography, Musical Stages, Richard Rodgers C'23 acknowledged that the sole reason he attended Columbia was to write the show. He also wrote of the role it played in his development as one of the shapers of the modern musical:

Beyond doubt, the Triangle Show at Princeton and the Hasty Pudding Show at Harvard were classier ventures, because Princeton and Harvard were classier schools. But the Varsity Show at Columbia offered a boy like me something no other school in the country could supply: an almost professional production. There were experienced directors, a beautifully equipped stage with good lighting situated in the heart of the Broadway theatre district, and best of all, professional musicians in the pit. Here, certainly, were near-ideal working conditions; here, possibly, was an opportunity that could be of incalculable help in furthering my career.

Everyone, of course, knows about Rodgers; they also know that Oscar Hammerstein II C'16 and Lorenz Hart C'18 were Varsity Show alumni as well.

But consider the others who have written, performed, directed, "teched," or otherwise been in on the show:

  • William de Mille C1900, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences;
  • the prolific playwright George Middleton C1902, president of the Dramatists Guild;
  • Raphael Kuhner Wupperman C1904, who as "Ralph Morgan" would co-found Actors Equity and the Screen Actors Guild, serving as first president of the latter;
  • Frank Fackenthal C1906, later Secretary and Acting President of the University;
  • the movie scenarist and director Ken Webb C1906;
  • his brother Roy Webb C'10, writer of scores for Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Notorious, Marty, and some 300 other films;
  • Dixon Ryan Fox C'11, president of Union College;
  • the noted lyricist Howard ("Dancing in the Dark") Dietz C'17, who as head of publicity for MGM created its famed "Leo the Lion" trademark;
  • the screenwriters Albert Maltz C'30 (Destination Tokyo and one of the "Hollywood Ten") and William Ludwig C'32 (Oscar co-winner for Interrupted Melody);
  • the minimalist poet Robert Lax C'38;
  • the Emmy-winning teleplaywright Ernest (Roots) Kinoy C'46 ...

That's a partial listing. Many more to come.

Veteran director Stefan Rudnicki C'66, a 1999 Grammy winner for The Children’s Shakespeare, once reflected on why the show has meant so much to so many alumni:

It allowed me to bite off more than I could chew, and keep chewing—and keep chewing and keep chewing! At the same time, it was a tremendous collaborative opportunity. The Varsity Show really pointed me in the direction of understanding the collaborative process, and then loving it and passing it on to others. It's a life experience—something without which we are the poorer.  

*

The Varsity Show began life at the end of the 19th century as a fund-raiser for the College's fledgling athletic teams. At the time, money for athletics was scarce, coming almost entirely from student and alumni pockets. It seems the Trustees had the odd notion that Columbia would soon become a world-class university and could probably dispense with its unruly undergraduates altogether. Sport was hardly a top priority.

To fill the coffers, the Columbia College Dramatic Club (the "Strollers") was established in 1886, with the proceeds from their first performance being donated to the varsity crew. For several years afterward, profits from Strollers shows, with titles like Narcissa, William Penn, and Lafayette, were also slated for various sports clubs. At that time, there was no burning desire for theatricals for their own sake. Indeed, athletic financing was thought so important that Spectator wrote in 1893, "This, it would seem to any clear-headed and reasonable person, should be the first aim of a dramatic club."

But an odious process soon took hold: the Strollers began keeping for themselves the money they raised. Worse, they filled their ranks with professional actors and other non-student types. Loyal College men, already suspicious of the possible demise of their school, smelled treachery and denounced the Dramatic Club's use of "Columbia" in its name. Spectator sounded a clarion call:

The present moment is ripe for a movement to establish a student dramatic organization. . . . [W]e have among us several men who, individually or collectively, are capable of writing an original burlesque. Harvard produces one every year. If Columbia men would only give this subject consideration; if they would get together and do a little talking and planning and acting, they could easily form a nucleus from which might develop a strong and powerful dramatic organization, to serve the ends we have spoken of. The question is, WILL THEY DO IT? 

The answer, it turned out, was yes. In the fall of 1893, widespread approval greeted the announcement that a new group, the Columbia College Musical Society, would present an original musical extravaganza, written and performed exclusively by students, to benefit the Columbia College Athletic Union. "The mis en scene [sic] will leave nothing to be desired," they assured.

The show, Joan of Arc, or The Monarch, The Maid, The Minister, and The Magician, by Guy Wetmore Carryl C1895 and Kenneth M. Murchison (Architecture 1894), debuted on April 2, 1894. Surviving accounts indicate a huge success. "The Columbia College Musical Society covered itself with glory as with a garment at the Academy last night by its brilliant performance," wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. This description gives some sense of the riotous proceedings:  

[A]ll sorts of things are burlesqued, from Mark Antony's address to the Romans . . . to the midway plaisance at [the] Chicago [World's Fair] and a football game at Manhattan field. The skirt dancers who have invaded the modern stage are more than burlesqued; they are imitated and even rivaled by the exceeding lightness and grace of the dance. . . . The Columbia Joan of Arc has precious little in common with the warlike maid of French history. He is 6 feet 3 in his stockings, for one thing. . . . Charles VII loses his throne in this burlesque by the characteristically Columbia device of pitching pennies for it with his son, Louis the Dauphin. 

As far as the undergraduates were concerned, though, what mattered was not so much what appeared on stage as what it represented. As the Columbia Literary Monthly editorialized,

Coming at the present time, when our alma mater is just about entering on the broader life and the wider fields of activity which the future undoubtedly holds in store for her, this departure from old methods is most gratifying . . . [I]n the Musical Society, which is henceforth to represent us in the field of dramatics, we have a body of men who are not only capable, but loyal to the college of their choice.