'Thrush Hour'

In a torch-lit dungeon beneath Gordon Hall, four hooded, masked members of “The Management” command Dean for Medical Education Jules Dienstag to implement a new curriculum at Harvard Medical School—one with a shorter preclinical period for students.

“Send them into clinic after a year?” asks Dienstag, played by second-year HMS student Benjamin Matthews. “Actually, that’s a great idea!”

No, The Management says. There will be no preclinical period at all. “All four years of medical school will be in one of our 37 affiliated hospitals,” one of them cackles.

Appalled, Dienstag declares he “would never endanger our students like this.”

And that is how Dienstag, the hero of the 108th annual HMS/Harvard School of Dental Medicine Second Year Show, gets rubbed out by the villains.

“Thrush Hour: The Case of the Mismanaged Curriculum,” which opened its three-night run on Dec. 4 at Roxbury Community College, was staged by members of the HMS/HSDM Class of 2017. Following tradition, the show lampooned everyone and everything the HMS community holds dear.

Directed by second-year students Arthur Bartolozzi and Carolyn Gaebler, the show ran three and a half hours and featured 13 original songs that ranged from the bawdy to the brainy.

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An early standout was “Meet the Microbes,” a parody of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance,” sung by Bartolozzi in his role as HMS Associate Professor of Pathology Alexander McAdam:

I like fungus, you eat fungus, ew, that stuff is in your eye!
Aspergillus, histoplasma and pneumo jirovecii
And then there are those little lovely bastard protozoa things
Entamoeba, giardia and Trypanosoma cruzi rings!

These are the only ones we care to teach at Hah-vahd
Only just because this is where they were disc-ah-vahd.

In the play, a new school year has begun, and students Jane Seymour of HST (played by Mary Tate) and Tyler “Tooth” McDagger of HSDM (Kristan Scott) feel like misfits.

Jane struggles to keep up with her overachieving MD-PhD classmates, while Tyler cares more about learning than his partygoing “dental bros” (the amusing Yianni Ellenikiotis, Mike Milligan and Taavish Sharma).

Dienstag, the Carl W. Walter Professor of Medicine at HMS, who in reality stepped down as Dean for Medical Education in October, learns that Jane and Tyler are the only students concerned about the looming curriculum change.

He lures them to his underground hideaway and convinces them to join forces by singing “Darkness of the Dean,” a parody of “Music of the Night” from “The Phantom of the Opera”:

Scheming, brooding, then to you my notes sent
Here I am now, in the TMEC basement
Here it is I'll be, beneath Holmes and Peabody
Till The Management has set the students free
I'm fighting for you, won't you fight with me?

The trio hatches a plot to stop the transition from the “old New Pathways” to the “new New Pathways” by kidnapping genetics professors David Altshuler and Joel Hirschhorn.

Prashant Rajan and Ramkumar Venkateswaran shone as a haughty Altshuler and a lovestruck Hirschhorn, respectively. Their duet, “Recessively in Love,” earned laughs and applause in Act Two.

Jane and Tyler’s duet, “You’ll Learn to Like Me,” based on “Take Me or Leave Me” from the musical “Rent,” also won accolades for the actors’ remarkable voices.

Dean for Students Nancy Oriol (Mia Geurts), under The Management’s thumb because it funds the Family Van, is charged with retrieving the abductees before the press finds out. She enlists the help of Randy King (Daniel Driscoll), who in the play is not only the Harry C. McKenzie Professor of Cell Biology but also a gun-toting detective. An HMS “PI,” to be exact.

King, in turn, recruits his old partner, Richard Schwartzstein (a marvelous Samuel Slavin), the HMS Ellen and Melvin Gordon Professor of Medical Education at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and director of the HMS Academy. In the play he is a hard-drinking chain smoker who quit HMS because he wasn’t allowed to fail students anymore.

The reunited crime solvers interrogate a series of faculty members, including a meek David Jones (Andreas Mitchell), the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at HMS; Massachusetts General Hospital professor of medicine and poetry fan Shiv Pillai (Aaron Yeoh), who speaks in haiku; and Paul Farmer (Gregory Parker), Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, who thinks he’s at a book signing.

Hirschhorn, who is also Concordia Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, alerts the detectives to his and Altshuler’s location by leaving a series of clues: three Gatorade bottles, a VHS tape of the movie “Gattaca” with three letters circled and a notebook with author and Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery Atul Gawande’s (incorrect) initials.

Singing “Work It,” set to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” with a bevy of backup dancers led by co-producer Elorm Avakame, King and Schwartzstein deduce that the clues code for amino acids: GGG, or glycine (G), TAC, or tyrosine (Y), and ATG, or methionine (M). They rescue the kidnap victims from the Vanderbilt Hall gym and learn about the curriculum conspiracy from Nancy and Tyler.

Meanwhile, student council elections take place. Apple Martin (a hilarious Carolyn Gaebler), a Paul Farmer-misquoting hippie type described as “a few polyps short of a brain coral,” faces off against J. Blake Wigglesworth III (Colin Fadzen), the preppy son of two HMS alumni who plans to become the world’s first orthopedic ophthalmic surgeon.

Blake’s dubious strengths are touted in “Preparation H,” a parody of the song “Gaston” from “Beauty and the Beast”:

Chorus:
No one’s Harvard as Blake
Or first-authored as Blake
And certainly, nobody’s hotter than Blake

Blake:
Just an MS1, still I’m intimidating!

Chorus:
My, what a guy is that Blake!

Blake wins, and The Management reveals that it orchestrated his rise to power so he would do its bidding. When details of the curriculum change leak and the students begin to riot, Blake is only too happy to lay down the law.

But Nancy, Tyler, Dienstag, King and Schwartzstein team up to blackmail Blake when they find out that he secretly wants to become a medical ethicist.

Nancy appeals to Blake’s softer side, and he arranges a meeting with The Management (played with great dramatic embellishment by Ben Arevalo, James Baker, Zoey Bouchelle and Nelly-Ange Kontchou).

In the play’s final scene, The Management members reveal why their policies confound reason: They make decisions based on random results drawn from a hat.

They then reveal their “true” identities—associate director of curriculum services Evan Sanders, course manager Lisa Neville, Scholars in Medicine administrator Kari Hannibal and an unnamed member of the HMS IT staff—and personal grudges.

Just when all seems lost, Dienstag, who earlier was dragged offstage by security guards, reappears to save the day.

In a tribute to Gandalf the Grey returning as Gandalf the White in “The Lord of the Rings,” he has transformed into Edward Hundert (still played by Matthews), the new HMS dean for medical education. When he pounds his magical staff on the floor, The Management collapses.

The play then took a turn for the serious when Hundert faced the audience to deliver a message of empowerment: “Students, I know you might feel powerless, but you can create change around here, and you don’t need to kidnap your genetics professors to do it.”

The production concluded with a reprise of the opening group musical number, “HMS Theme.”

Another moment that lingered was a question posed midway through the performance: When the actual new curriculum launches in 2015 and students enter the clinic after their first year, what happens to the Second Year Show?

Full cast and crew listings can be found at the Second Year Show website.