Cambridge has it Footlights, Harvard, its Hasty Pudding Club, and Princeton has its Triangle Club, a musical comedy troupe like no other. This month Princeton Triangle Club brings Zero Gravitas to McCarter Theatre, a characteristically irreverent take on the George Clooney and Sandra Bullock film. Don’t expect high drama. Expect singing space-pirates, over-emotional robots, and of course, that famous all-male kickline.
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ow in its 123rd year, the Princeton Triangle Club is the oldest collegiate musical comedy troupe, and the only co-ed collegiate troupe, in the country to take an original studentwritten musical on a national tour every year. After premiering at McCarter Theatre, Zero Gravitas will go on the road for the holiday season. The list of past productions is a trip down memory lane and a tour of the social, cultural and political change of more than a century, from the late 19th through the 20th and into the 21st. Besides poking fun at student life, examinations and eating clubs, Triangle has tackled war protests, political scandals, and women’s rights with a playful mix of satire and undergraduate irreverence. Think Gilbert and Sullivan and the Three Stooges with a dash of Monty Python. Absurd plots, elaborate costumes, fanciful scenery, jokes and topical references. Witness titles such as: The Pirates of Pennsnec in 1898; The Tiger Smiles in 1930; High Sobriety in 1965; Future Schlock in 1972; Bermuda Love Triangle in 1993; 101 Damnations in 1998; The Blair Arch Project in 1999; This Side of Parody in 2002; A Turnpike Runs Through It in 2007, which also saw the premier of Whitman Can’t Jump. In recent years, University luminaries have been on the receiving end with Cornel West Side Story in 2009-10 and last year’s Shirley You’re Joking, Mrs. Tilghman! Although the Triangle Club officially began in 1891, it had its precedents. According to The Long Kickline: A History of the Princeton Triangle Club by Donald Marsden ’64, undergraduates staged
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what might today be called a re-enactment of the Battle of Princeton on the centennial, January 3, 1877. It is believed to have been the first major outdoor community pageant in the nation. Two years later, the short-lived Young Apollo Club put on a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular H.M.S. Pinafore. Then, in November, 1885, undergraduates staged Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of manners, She Stoops to Conquer. The first show in true Triangle tradition of original musical comedy was Po-ca-hon-tas in 1891. A huge hit, it went on to play the Trenton Opera House. But plans to take the show to New York City foundered because the University administration feared that “church people would feel that Princeton was going theatrical.” One can almost hear the “Egads” of mustached Victorian worthies. It would not be the first time that students and administrators would be at odds over Triangle activities. Po-ca-hon-tas was revived in 1898 but it wasn’t until 1901 that a Triangle show made it to New York City. The following year, they toured as far as Pittsburgh and in years to come they would regularly go all the way to Chicago. In the original Po-ca-hon-tas program (the one shown here, of the later 1898 production, is from the collection of the Historical Society of Princeton), the show is described as “an original aboriginal erratic operatice semi-civilized and demi-savage extravaganza, being a per-version of ye true and wonderrefulle historie of ye renowned Indian princesse/ In Three Acts and Five somewhat similar scenes/ with one act slipped in incidentally to take up time” and with “jokes dug up and resuscitated, ground out and tied together.”
THE LONG KICKLINE
Joshua L. Logan ’31, who wrote and acted in three Triangle Club productions before going on to co-author and direct South Pacific, writes in the preface to Marsden’s history, that one of the club’s main values is that it offers “a rare opportunity for undergraduate expression of vocal and visual outcries against the establishment and poetic outbursts in celebration of life and young love.” Its members have the chance to experiment in play—and song-writing, acting, singing, dancing, playing instruments, and designing and constructing scenery and costumes. It was “the proving ground for talent that is still permitted to fumble; it is a place to sing, to do pratfalls, to thumb one’s nose at authority, to test the last liberties of adolescence, to taste the true wine of being an American.” In other words, it was a perfect training for the real business of show-business. Logan went on to a successful Broadway stage and film career as a writer, producer and director, including credits for Mr. Roberts and Paint Your Wagon, among others. Like the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, which spawned some of the U.K.’s best-loved comic writers and actors—David Frost, Michael Frayn, Germaine Greer, Jonathan Miller, Trevor Nunn, Peter Cook, most of the Monty Python team including John Cleese, as well as Douglas Adams, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Sasha Baron Cohen, to name but a handful— Princeton’s Triangle Club was the first step toward fame for numerous authors, composers and actors. By his own account, Logan enrolled at Princeton precisely because of the Triangle Club. F. Scott
PRINCETON MAGAZINE HOLIDAY 2013
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