Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Long before our heroine is rescued, you will have realized that Sunshine is not so gullible as its title and plot line suppose. In reality, Sunshine is nothing less than a very funny musical comedy satire of the Nelson Eddy and Jenette MacDonald films that were so popular in the 1930's. The show played successfully on Broadway for three years in the early sixties and now a group of freshmen at the Quad are directing and producing it in an attempt to show Dean Fox, as director Greg Dealwie '80 has pointed out, that freshmen aren't just sitting...
...plot involves the president of a tottering republic and his wife. They have just escaped an assassination attempt by anarchists as the play opens. Killed instead are a colonel sitting next to the president and the first lady's beloved dog, who dies of a heart attack. This rather dull premise is the funniest thing about the play. The audience is treated to 80 minutes of maunderings by the protagonists, the wife detailing her hatred for her husband and for the anarchists, and the president blathering endlessly to his mistress about his problems...
Since none of the others characters in the play say more than a few words, it is hard to judge the quality of the performances of the other actors mired in this hopeless plot. Tanya Luhrmann is fine as the president's mistress, saying very little but looking lovely and excruciatingly bored with her lover's meaningless ramblings...
...some sort of political commentary is intended, its meaning is completely obscured by the pointless plot. The President is dead at the end of the play, yet the audience is not really sure who killed him, although we are told that the president's son, one of the anarchists, may be the killer. If so, so what? Is the point then that all repressive regimes deserve to fall, or that morons have no right to power? Or is the president a tragic figure, unable to comprehend the forces that inexorably dictate his destruction, much less his own shattered personal life...
...With a plot complicated enough to confuse even the most well-connected in the audience and some song which might leave Jerome Kern wondering if pieces of his Showboat ever floated into Cambridge, the exuberant cast of leading men has taken its annual sidestep into the Hasty Pudding Theater. Cardinal Knowledge, at least ostensibly, is about a cardinal trying to track down the inheritance of his girlfriend in 17th century France but, as usual at the Hasty Pudding, it's the good time you have, not the money you lost that counts. And with the excellently choreographed, excellently executed dance...