Buffalo Power

No Bicentennial issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE would be complete without noting The Buffalo Show, an irreverent tribute to America's 200th birthday, which played to packed houses in the Warner Bentley Theater through a fiveperformance run late last month.

Billed by authors Grant Moran '78 and Tom Beebee '77 as a "montage of bad taste, good music, and anarchistic politics," the all-student production was sub-titled "Wild Bill's Bisontennial Build-a-Better-Buffalo Show." Satirizing the commercialism that has characterized the Bicentennial, the show zeroed in on the make-a-buck artists who have capitalized on every facet of the celebration.

The multi-media presentation, directed by Sioban Harlow '77, featured skits, songs, dances, slides, a cast of seven and a four-piece band playing music composed by Michael Canick '75. The show was one of this year's winners of the Marcus Heiman awards for student arts projects.

The audience was greeted by costumed actors selling "buffalo-chip cookies," then entertained by a sequence of happenings, variously amusing and shocking, tuneful and distasteful: a vampish Statue of Liberty as "torch singer," the huckstering of firearms in the context of political assassination, a plan for running the country exclusively on buffalo power, parodies of TV's "Bicentennial Minutes." Even the color slides immortalizing the ail-American family's trip west were not immune.

The Dartmouth's reviewer gave TheBuffalo Show high marks for bad taste and good music, but found its politics "less nihilistic than cynical." But it was a "healthy cynicism," he said.