Spotlight

The Moral of the Story? Never Mess with an Immunologist

This year’s Second Year Show, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Fornix,” paid tongue-in-cheek homage to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and to the academic maestros and divas of HMS. The audience cheered the mind-boggling array of characters—puppet, cardboard, and three-dimensional—through nearly 3 hours of action-packed, HMS-based, adult satire that ran from Jan. 26 through 28 at Roxbury Community College.

Directed by Debbie Doroshow and produced by Jennifer Srygley and Zayed Yasin, the gala included strong, skillfully performed bhangra and salsa dances, razor-sharp portrayals of some of the preclinical years’ most (in)famous faculty, and pop-culture references ranging from Jim Jones to Brokeback Mountain to (somewhat inexplicably) the Kool-Aid Man. Perhaps the most amusing were the charming continuity scenes featuring commentary by Julian Seifter and Richard Schwartzstein. Portrayed by the talented second-years Dan Cassarella and Roberto Novoa using puppets designed specifically for the show, Seifter and Schwartzstein were transformed into opera-box hecklers whose R-rated commentary likely had Jim Henson rolling in his grave.

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Photos by Steve Gilbert

The first act begins with the harried Class of 2008 gathering up the cast and crew for their opening night production of A Bedside Story, a medical twist on Bernstein’s classic musical. Unfortunately, the cast is all gone—mysteriously kidnapped—with the exception of the show’s Maria, Missy LaDiva.

The director, played by Ashley Morris, panics and, in her desperation, recruits HMS faculty members to fill in the roles of the missing students—hilariously tapping Sam Kennedy (Jonathan Fillmore) and Shiv Pillai (Parin Patel) to play gang members Bernardo and Chino, among others. In the meantime, the show’s producer, stage manager, and tech director—Sheldon, Steve, and Sue (Nicholas Zwang, Kervin Mack, and Sirena Hsieh)—go off in search of the missing students.

Clues left strewn about in the TMEC and in the bowels of the Brigham soon lead to the suspected villain—the deceivingly mild-mannered Andrew Lichtman (David Stark). Sick of being ignored in the Second Year Show, the Immunology course director has turned to all manner of sins to soothe his hurt feelings, not only kidnapping the students, but also creating slave robots and cloning himself (natch, into monoclonal “Andy” bodies).

Along the way, the show within a show goes on as the trio hunts down the evil Lichtman. While not quite the West Side Story of Bernstein’s genius, the HMS version had its own flashes of brilliance from the hilarious, vaguely nerdy rumble between HST and New Pathway girls to the faculty anatomists wearing do-rags and wielding (faux) switchblades as Jets gang members, not to mention Paul Farmer (played by Todd Theman) vying for center stage as the show’s faculty star. Finally, the intrepid trio frees the missing student stars, capturing the evil Lichtman, who gives himself up willingly after the stage crew refuses to stop clicking their four-color pens.

Highlights of the show included the impressive, if gratuitous, bhangra and salsa group numbers; Megan Browning’s incredible performance and vocal acrobatics as principal student-star Missy LaDiva; and the well-written, perfectly rendered spoofs of Dana Stearns (Noah Stites-Hallett) and Abul Abbas (Krishna Yeshwant). In keeping with the tradition of satire as old as Aristophanes, the faculty members who were maligned the most in the show left most satisfied—including, one hopes, Dr. Lichtman.

—Tarayn Grizzard

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Copyright 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College