This image comes from a collection of souvenir programs from the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The Hasty Pudding Club was formed in 1795 when twenty-one Harvard students crowded into a dorm room to celebrate the establishment of a new on-campus society. Along with their goals of cultivating friendship and patriotism a special mandate was made that “the members in alphabetical order shall provide a pot of hasty pudding for every meeting.” And so goes the story of how the Hasty Pudding Club was cooked up.
The Club originally held mock trials but in 1844 a member broke with trial tradition and produced an opera, Bomabastes Furioso, and so the first Hasty Pudding theatrical show was born. In the beginning members just adapted productions but by the 1860s the students were writing them. Most of the shows are considered musical burlesque and musical comedy whose titles were typically a play on words such as, Serf’s Up!, Sealed with a Quiche!, and The Jewel of Denial. In 1951 the famous Woman of the Year celebration was introduced with Gertrude Lawrence, an English actress and musical comedy performer, and Man of the Year followed a few years later with Bob Hope. The Pudding continues to produce annual shows and this year the 164th production is There Will Be Flood!
The programs not only detail an interesting history of the Hasty Pudding Club, but they also provide insight about popular advertising and social interests of the day. I also discovered an unexpected surprise lurking between the pages of a program in The lid’s off, a tale of a typical Long Island house party.
The program contained a Western Union telegram reading, “This is imperative bring a mob to one naught[?] five east fifty five, Professor Einstein and Mae West just blew in – Bill Lewis and Hugh Wade.” One can only hope that it wasn’t a prank and they had the pleasure of meeting both the famous physicist and the notorious starlet.
To explore more programs for the Pudding, go to Hasty Pudding Club Theatricals souvenir programs, 1899-2003 (MS Thr 752). They are part of the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theatre, Dance, and Music in the Harvard Theatre Collection.
[post contributed by Alison Harris, Archival Processor]