Star-Crossed...Students

 There's no way i can convey the enormity of the exuberance and energy and obvious hundreds of hours of work that were on display, although anyone who has ever worked on something like this or been close to one knows.

Every year the arts and science students put on a musical that is related to their program - past productions were called Feel the Fission, An Inquiry Line and Project Sassafras, among others. It's student-written - this year Eve's housemate Lauren was a co-writer. They write the script, then find songs to base the parody songs on, then music students arrange the songs and write choreography. The band conductor was only in second year! Then they work on it for hours and hours and hours, all while carrying heavy course loads. Eve said in second year that she didn't think there was any way she could do the musical with her workload. In third year I told her to do the musical even if she had to drop a course. She told them she didn't want a lead, but then after her audition they said 'are you SURE about that part' and she said 'okay fine.'

This year she said she definitely couldn't do a lead role, and she claims that the musical took up less of her time, which is good but I don't really see how that's possible, since she was in most of the play and had multiple solo verses, although no solo songs. 

The play was called An Artsci Story and was Romeo and Juliet but with arts and science - Romeo is Lord Art's son and Juliet is Lady Sci's daughter. The Prince is of McMaster instead of Verona, and the Arts and Sciences are feuding over whose thesis is going to win Thesis Day. Romeo and Juliet each become curious about what would happen if they became more open-minded about the arts and science being separate, and everyone panics and feuds accordingly.

In Romeo and Juliet, the nurse is Juliet's nanny and confidante, which she also kind of is here, but she's also Nurse, a resurrectionist who freaks everybody out with her dead-body experimentation. 

At one point, she pulls a dead bunny out of her purse to impress Lady Sci with her progress.

The Arts family has a tea party where Romeo substitutes kombucha for the usual oolong and they end up doing keg stands. When Romeo says something about exploring science in front of the prince, his mother apologizes and says her son has had too much of 'the sweet booch' tonight.

Mercutio dies when someone switches Tybalt's mild acids with her murder acids. The Arts and Sciences join together (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein coupled with galvanism experiments) to bring him back to life.

And of course he's green.

Romeo and Juliet are just friends and study partners. At one point when Friar Lawrence calls them 'lovebirds' and encourages them to kiss, Juliet stomps offstage muttering "that's NOT a part of this fucking STORY".

Instead of fake taking poison, Juliet pretends to drop out of school, but Romeo doesn't find out that it was a ruse and drops out for real. 

There's a murder board

There are three professors on the board, and the night I was there the one with the cat ears was there (Dr. Clarke) and he absolutely cackled. He is famous for posting a rhapsodic complimentary passage of writing after the musical every year that is full of Classical allusions and nearly incomprehensible, it's very enjoyable. 

Eventually they find out that the prince has been keeping the departments separate and selling their ideas for profit (yeah, don't examine that one too closely) and they send the prince to the 'less lovely town of Western' and merge the faculties. 

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Professor Jean and I (my date on Saturday night, who had a cameo in the 2019 production when she was department head) left Eve at the theatre, about to get her mike off and head to the cast party.

And here she is walking home at 3 a.m. with a giant garlic baguette that she picked up at the pizza place on the way. 

I have to upload the videos to Youtube to post them, in clips of less than 60 seconds since they're based on copyrighted songs, and I'm bad at editing (and shot this covertly from my lap, and the chick beside me kept screaming which made the sound go wonky). Let's see if this works.

Video:

Science is What We Know - tune of 'Stick to the Status Quo' from High School musical (I was so excited when she told me about this one)

Mix Our Disciplines - tune of 'Time Warp' from Rocky Horror Picture Show

We Are the Same - tune of 'The Worm' by HMLTD 

Let Us Learn - tune of 'Let It Grow' from The Lorax