Rave Reviews for Law Revue

The popular student production returns to the Tishman Stage and makes the grade once again

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Forget about Law Review. Springtime at NYU is all about Law Revue, the annual musical send-up of the Law School. This year, Ricky and the Lawyer Factory came to the Tishman Auditorium for four nights—and played to an extremely appreciative audience.

A takeoff on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ricky is the story of five lucky students (played by Deepa Janakiraman, ’05; Hillary Noll, ’04; Margo Kaplan, ’04; Mitchell Kent, ’05; and Kelly Jordan, ’04) who win a magical tour of the new Law School building with the quirky Dean Ricky Wonka (Arthur Dobelis, ’05). As they travel through the school, the students and everyone they meet poke fun at all aspects of law school life. In one scene, law students who want to start a new journal are so desperate for hard-to-come-by supplies that they end up fighting over ink toner. Elizabeth Loeb, ’04; Erica Alterwitz, ’05; Eve Moskowitz, ’05; Catherine Cugell, ’04; Krupa Desai, ’06; Casey Cohn,’04, and Gillian Burgess, ’06, had the audience roaring with their hilarious slap-stick fisticuffs. Another scene parodied the wide variety of courses and seminars available to law students: Professors Rachel Barkow (Heather Childs, ’06), David Richards (Ariel Joseph, ’06), Rochelle Dreyfuss (Robin Effron, ’04), Noah Feldman (Joseph Treloar, ’04), Linda Silberman (Meredith Stead, ’06), and Barry Friedman (Rob Elder, ’04) sang and danced their way through a discussion of the merits of a Colloquium on Law and Interpretive Dance. Even real professors got into the act: Dean Richard Revesz and several other members of the faculty made cameo appearances discussing their “methods” of choosing grades, such as dropping papers from the stairs.

High Note

The heart of the revue is always the music—and Ricky’s numbers were terrific. The show opened strongly with a spoof of the Erie doctrine, the Supreme Court, and the Root-Tilden-Kern program sung to the tune of U2’s “Beautiful Day”. Other musical highlights included a takeoff of Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchmaker,” in which students asked Gail Cutter, then-director of career counseling and placement, to strike them a match with a prestigious law firm; and an entertaining rap, “Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Third Year,” delivered with flair by Kent and Emily Bushnell (’05). Ricky and the Lawyer Factory ended with a flourish, with the cast’s own rendition of “Higher and Higher.” They sang “Our law is lifting us higher than we’ve ever been lifted before. Let’s keep it up when things look dire; we’ll have NYU pride forever more.” The rousing chorus brought the audience to its feet. Law Revue definitely passed with flying colors.