'Roar, Lion, Roar': The Varsity Show's History With Columbia Athletics

Upper West Side NY

14 October, 2021

4:18 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY SOPHIE CRAIG OCTOBER 12, 2021 As its cast members love to remind us, the Varsity Show is Columbia's oldest performing arts tradition. How this tradition actually began is more of a mystery. The first Varsity Show—and each show thereafter for the next decade—was not a theatrical staple, but rather the bells and whistles of a fundraising campaign for Columbia's athletics union. As Columbia prepares for Homecoming weekend, let us take a look back at the Lions' theatrical history. Best known for its comedic send-ups of campus life and endlessly acclaimed alumni—boasting both Rodgers and Hammerstein—the Varsity Show has long abandoned its sporting roots. For the past two years, with athletics on hiatus and lyricists' satirical skills directed at Columbia's COVID-19 response, our last clue as to this football-filled history is in the name of the show itself. First performed in the Manhattan Athletic Club Theatre, the stars of its earliest renditions were actually athletes. "Pony ballets"—an extravagant, once-beloved tradition and arguably the Varsity Show's first claim to fame—featured "the company's biggest, burliest men" dancing in drag. Separate "try-outs" were held to recruit footballers for these glittery chorus lines, for which three years of "service" earned participants a silver crown. In 1924, these try-outs proved so popular that the entire ballet was made up of football players—triggering infrastructural concerns about the venue and the show's eventual cancellation. "It was decided at the last minute that a pony ballet averaging one hundred and ninety-five pounds per man might prove too much for the stage in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf," one Spectator reporter wrote. The show in question—a revival of the wildly popular "Half Moon Inn," which premiered in 1923 and even ventured beyond the Columbia gates for a regional tour—also contained the familiar tune of "Roar, Lion, Roar," soon to be adopted as the football team's fight song. Pony ballets defined the era in Varsity Show's history when women were prohibited from joining the musical satire's cast. But female students were not completely absent—they were the football players' dance instructors and, occasionally, crowned "Varsity Queen." Named for its role as "fiscal cheerleader" to varsity sports, the Varsity Show soon became a spectacle in its own right, so much so that it started stealing candidates away from the actual football games. One Spectator editor attempted to explain this phenomenon in a February 1929 column, under the headline "Varsity Show vs. Football." "Our attention was called to a curious situation not long ago, one which may or may not be important in gaging [sic] the temper of the Columbia Campus," the editor wrote. "It is that the candidates for Varsity Show far outnumber those for the Varsity football team, excluding in each case the candidates for the Pony Ballet and the Junior Varsity team." And so began the popularity contest between the Varsity Show and varsity football team—two entertainment events positioned at opposite ends of campus life. One of a handful of theatrically-inclined footballers, Brian Dennehy, CC '60—a varsity football captain turned two-time Tony Award winner, who passed away last year—once described the unspoken divide between thespians and athletes on campus. "In those days, the Players had an artistic definition of themselves which didn't allow a football player to be active," Dennehy said. "I remember going up there a few times and distinctly feeling unwelcome." The pony ballets disappeared mid-century due to financial constraints—or perhaps the refusal to down-size from a "circus type spectacle" staged in art deco ballrooms and reviewed by predominant New York newspapers. In 1958, one disappointed Spectator writer, Michael Shute, voiced his dissent in an extensively researched—and extremely alliterative—article, "Spectacular Varsity Shows Have Sung Their Swan Song." "For better or for worse, the pony ballet has been eliminated and the Varsity Show no longer is considered the top flight entertainment that once gained recognition in the New York press," Shute wrote. Fifty years after the end of "varsity" crossovers, the Varsity Show decided to pay tribute to its early years of football burlesque through the I.A.L. Diamond award. Named after "The Apartment" screenwriter, who began a long collaboration with Billy Wilder after writing four consecutive Varsity Shows, this award goes to an accomplished alumnus every year. Only the 2004 honoree, however—acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally, CC '60—went home with a "gold-painted Ken doll dressed in drag and mounted on a stand like an Oscar statuette." Deputy A&E Editor Sophie Craig can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.