Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a musical satire by undergraduate students from Columbia and Barnard that took aim at university administrators. We’ll also find out how music therapy is helping some children in Brooklyn cope with the stress of homelessness.
Theater people always say the show must go on, and so it did in an auditorium at Columbia University less than 100 yards from a pro-Palestinian encampment, where police officials arrested more than 100 students on April 18.
This year’s Varsity Show, a musical called “Mayday,” is a comparatively tame satire that presents a university administration as tone-deaf and unresponsive to student concerns. The director, Caroline Egler, a senior at Barnard College, which shares academic resources and extracurricular activities with Columbia, called the show “a love letter to the students” — and a denunciation of the Columbia administration’s “censorship and repression” now and in the past.
In the last few days, administrators and students have taken part in negotiations but have not come to an agreement about removing the encampment, which students reoccupied after the arrests. Columbia sent an email to students on Friday saying that bringing back the police “at this time” would be counterproductive.
As for “Mayday,” the script contained no mentions of the Israel-Gaza war or the demonstrations. Onstage, student actors portrayed presidents of the 270-year-old school. A couple of the actors wore powdered wigs, as Columbia’s early leaders might have done.
But the loudest cheers and longest applause often came at the expense of Columbia’s current president, Nemat Shafik, who was installed less than a year ago and who goes by Minouche.
The students behind the show said that they began writing the dialogue and the songs months ago, long before Columbia had the Police Department clear the pro-Palestinian encampment 11 days ago. “This has always been a show about the Columbia administration failing to handle a crisis,” Lauren Unterberger, the show’s lyricist, said. “This show has always been about Columbia’s failure to accept change and to value or listen to student voices.”
The show revolves around the idea that Columbia has always been run by the book, a volume with red-leather binding, said to have been passed down from president to president since the school was founded in 1754. “If there are R.A.s that want to be in a union, there’s a chapter for it,” said Unterberger, referring to resident advisers, the Columbia or Barnard students who assist fellow students living in dormitories. “If they’re expanding the campus, there’s a chapter for it.” All Shafik “has to do is follow the book. Cue the musical number.”
In the show, Shafik sends four students to a conference, but the private jet carrying them crashes. When word reaches the campus, Shafik discovers that the book does not have an entry for that. “Plane crash? Plane crash? I can’t afford a scandal this early in my presidency,” the Shafik character says.
The four students, unhurt but lost in a forest, dream of a “better Columbia,” a university free of the frustration and bureaucracy that the undergraduates behind the play describe as facts of life. The four students are eventually rescued and return to the campus, committed to pressing their ideas for changes. Shafik is not interested: Columbia has always done things by the book, she says, so why change now?
“What has been so stunning,” said Casey Rogerson, a senior at Columbia who wrote the book for the show with Julian Gerber, another senior, “is the way that lines that we wrote months ago have new meaning.” Unterberger echoed that idea, saying that no songs were cut since the encampment went up: “What we had written speaks presciently to the moment we are in.”
Egler said that the students had set out “to go pretty easy on Minouche” immediately after she appeared at a congressional hearing on April 17, “because she was so beat up and just totally steamrolled by both the representatives and her own team.” After the arrests of the students, that impulse gave way to a different one: “The students have something to say, and they need to be listened to.”
“There’s always a question: Is the musical going to be good?” Egler said. But she said the stakes “became so much higher” on a campus that had been “grieving” in ways that were at once both unified and divided.
Our writer Olivia Bensimon, who attended the performance on Friday, told me that it was a “really fun show, with lots of talent and passion and commitment from these students.”
Olivia, who has covered many of the recent protests and rallies at Columbia, also said: “The message was clear.”
Weather
Enjoy a mostly sunny day in the low 80s. At night, it will be partly cloudy, with temperatures dipping into the 50s.
Homelessness is hard on children. Therapists from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music have found that teaching homeless children to beat rhythms and write songs is a way to help deal with the stress of not having a permanent place to live.
Music therapists like Dannyele Crawford make regular visits to the 158-family shelter, run by the nonprofit Camba, in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. My colleague Andy Newman watched one recent afternoon, as Crawford told six children in a room lined with computers to imagine living on another planet. “The beat is going to be based off that,” Crawford said.
The children, wearing headsets, began choosing from the audio loops in the music software program GarageBand. Soon, the sound of clashing tinny riffs filled the room, and the pint-size producers danced in their seats.
“It’s not that easy for kids and teenagers to talk about what they’ve been through, especially while they’re going through it,” said Toby Williams, director of the conservatory’s music therapy program, which serves more than 2,000 people per year. “Music provides an opportunity for people to process trauma in a different mode of expression.”
Joslyn Carter, administrator of the City Department of Homeless Services, said that the conservatory’s music therapy program “really does help children just be children.”
Bella Diaz, 6, and her little brother, Aiden — whose family moved to the shelter in 2021 — said that their planet was called the Bronx. “And we are moving to it!” Her parents recently found a landlord who had accepted their subsidized rent voucher.
Bella and Aiden blended the rhythm track and three minor-key melodies into a composition that “sounded a little New Yorky” to their older brother, JoAngel, 7. He also said that their music had made him think of “kitties and flowers,” specifically roses.
Bella liked that. “My name is Bella Rose, like a rose,” she said. “I’m going to name my planet Bronx Rose.”
METROPOLITAN diary
To be kinder
Dear Diary:
It was the late 1960s, and I was attending Cooper Union at night and living in a tiny shared apartment in the East Village.
I had become interested in Eastern thought and was trying to learn how to be kinder in my life. As part of that effort, I had just started attending yoga classes.
One day I took the bus between home and school because of heavy rain. The bus was crowded, but I had found a seat.
A man got on the bus and was standing near me dripping wet. He was muttering to himself, and I strained to hear what he was saying. He was complaining about his life.
“No one cares about me,” he said. “I am alone. No one cares. I don’t have anything.”
He mentioned that he didn’t even have an umbrella to protect him from the rain.
As he spoke, people looked at the floor or looked away. His voice got louder. My stop was coming up, and I didn’t know what to do.
Then, as I stood up and got ready to move toward the door, I handed the man my umbrella.
He shouted at me, asking me what this was.
This is for you, I said.
He asked why.
“Because I love you,” I mumbled.
What, he asked — as though he hadn’t heard me.
“Because I love you,” I shouted before jumping off the bus.
— Shanti Norris
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
