I’m really pleased there’s always another group to come in and carry it forward.” Your normal perspective on business students is that they’re serious people,” says Gooding. “I do marvel that it’s lasted 40-plus years. None of the original participants could have foreseen that A Placement Line - the title for the first Follies parody - would have such staying power. “My Johnny Carson routine clearly was the high point of the show, let’s be honest.” “I’m sorry to say that I remember it well,” says Gooding, still flashing tongue-in-cheek humor. An equivalent paradox might be an Engineering School ‘crafts fair,’ or a Wistar Institute ‘sing-along,’” declared the DP. After paying $2.50 per ticket, the audience at Annenberg Auditorium was treated to an opening musical number in which a performer sang, “Who am I anyway?/Am I my résumé?” While the show sold out, Gooding notes that the student paper didn’t quite know what to make of its odd mash-ups: “A Wharton ‘musical comedy’ is incongruous at best. “We just went ahead and didn’t call any of the creatives behind A Chorus Line.”Īs the Daily Pennsylvanian noted on February 4, 1977, the first show was a novel addition to the Wharton community. “This was before the day when people were worried about intellectual property and stuff like that,” says Gooding, who served as executive producer of the first show. They turned the famously raunchy “T and A” lyrics into “Suits and Vests.” They swapped “At the Ballet” for “In the Journal.” In a playful prelude to the era of Move Fast and Break Things, none of the Whartonites thought much about the potential consequences of what they were doing. They grafted the angst of their own lives onto a musical about dancers vying for jobs in New York City.
The friends thought: Why not a spoof? A satire quickly took shape. Then there was Gooding, who led Duke’s musical theater group as an undergrad. “I thought the lyrics just lent themselves to the MBA job-search process.”Īidan Cleary WG24 and Mary Joseph WG23 prepare to take the stage.Īmong the group of friends, one was an accomplished pianist another was a playwright. “I’d seen it about a half-dozen times,” says Tom Gooding WG77. Even after a few rounds, the students couldn’t get the songs out of their heads. A small group of thespians liked to meet at local watering holes, and among their favorite topics of conversation was the 1975 Broadway sensation A Chorus Line, one of the buzziest bits of pop culture at the time. Like so many campus traditions, this one began with pizza and beer.
“Part of the value of the MBA experience is leaning into something you didn’t have time to do before,” says Becker, a former minor-league baseball pitcher. About the only thing that’s not laughable about the Follies is the participants’ intense dedication to making this all work. In addition to secret agents, this year’s show will feature a shirtless dance routine, a riff on Frozen’s “Let It Go” (transformed into “Pret to go/Line’s too slow!”), an impersonation of management professor Zeke Hernandez, toilet seats, hockey injuries, bribes to the World Trade Organization, gurus, padawans, and yachts. “I want to be on the record to say that with our Follies, there’s no equal.” “Other schools may talk a big game,” says Smith. The production value has escalated to the point of rivaling off-Broadway plays. Since 1977, students here have been putting on multi-hour shows that today sell out Annenberg’s Zellerbach Theatre. But the Wharton Follies are a different breed. They’ll poke fun at their favorite professors or the MBA job market and call it a day. Unlike at Wharton, most of the others put on a few sketches here or make an SNL-style video there. The Follies cast huddles backstage on opening night in February before their first number of the evening, set to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”Įach of the so-called M7 business schools has a “follies” group. And then here, you’re being asked to motivate a group of amateur comedy writers who aren’t being paid any money.” having fun? All of those dynamics were things we were learning about conceptually in the classroom. “How do I get the best out of people? How do people balance output vs.
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“It’s definitely one of the most impactful leadership roles I’ve ever had in my life,” says Kurt Smith WG13, now CEO of Fexa, a software startup. For many of the roughly 75 first- and second-year students who comprise the Follies, it’s the apex of their time at Wharton. “Our job is not to create the best musical or the best re-creation of a movie, but rather to find a vehicle to satirize and enjoy the people that we’ve shared this time with, the things we’ve experienced together,” says Nolan Becker WG23, one of the head writers for this year’s show.Įach year, Follies members collectively spend thousands of hours producing an original show from scratch, handling everything from set design to script writing to assembling a live band.
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