BWW Blog: Fake Moos - Written, Produced, Directed, and Starring the Harvard Class of 2023

As you can probably already guess, the arts look a little different this year than they have in the past. Last year, in my first semester of college, I was really lucky to start becoming involved with the theater community at Harvard, participating in different productions and making new friends. But come March, at first glance, it seemed like all of the steps that theater organizations were taking for their spring productions were for naught, as everyone packed up their bags and left the stages and auditoriums bare and empty.

Fortunately, that was not entirely the case. Theater-lovers on campus were not ready to let the magic go, and student-run production companies worked tirelessly to think up solutions and innovative ways to continue sharing the talents and passions of Harvard students.

One particular production had been working since 2019 to entertain was the freshman musical, also known as the Froshical. At the beginning of the semester each year, a team is created entirely of first year students to produce, direct, write, and choreograph a spoofy and hilarious show. Then, over winter break, the entire production is written up. This year, the class of 2023 wrote "Fake Moos", also known as the true story of John Harvard's life, with underlying motifs of vegetarianism, illegal singing, and, of course, cows. Then, in January and February, the casting process was underway, and a full thirty person cast of freshmen was born. I was really excited to have been cast as Ann Harvard, John Harvard's wife - it felt really special to be the only person to play a specific role, and there were changes being made to the script and the score to make the character even more "me".

The rehearsal process was just starting to rev up, and we were all becoming more comfortable with our characters. That is... until in person rehearsals were no longer an option. Everyone was sent home with a heavy heart, but we knew that we had to somehow memorialize the production that so many of our classmates worked so hard to create. Many different ideas were optioned, including making a cast recording/album, making a movie if we arrived back on campus in the fall, or even waiting until live theater was safe and performing the show as written in 2021. In the end, the production team decided to perform the production in a hybrid online fashion over Zoom. This way, a near unlimited number of people could see us performing, and since we have rehearsal videos learning the choreography, those could be incorporated to make the production look more cohesive.

When I auditioned for Fake Moos in January, I was definitely not expecting to be belting out the show's songs in the comfort of my childhood bedroom to an open laptop screen, but I'm really excited to keep the magic of theater alive in any way that I can!

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