For this year's Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts, artists from all over the world gathered to celebrate music, theater and studio and public art. In addition to promoting this surfeit of options, Brandeis made sure to highlight student productions. Co-directed and written by brother and sister pair Jared Field '11 and Jessie Field '13 (Jared, music; Jessie, lyrics, along with co-music director Amelia Lavranchuk '12), their original production Harold! The Musical offered something a little lighter and a little humbler than most Bernstein Festival fare-a charming musical satire about a man whose greatest dream is to escape to an idyllic world in which everyone sings all of the time. Seeing Harold! The Musical reminded me of nothing so much as James Thurber's classic short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." The subject: male protagonist in a mind-numbing, humiliating job, prone to extreme daydreaming. The result: incessant criticism by those around him who wonder why he can't just face up to reality and live up to his responsibilities. In Harold!, the title character (Matthew Cohen '11) spends his days at the most tedious occupation imaginable- working for a toy company that more closely resembles a sinister corporation. The company constructs "Business Bears," teddy bears with recorded voices that exhort employees to work harder. His boss, Mr. N. P. Sludgebottom (played by Gabe Bronk '11), is an old classmate turned ruthless manager obsessed with efficiency. In fact, everyone around him, from his wife Shirley (Taylor Hamilton '10) to his sycophantic coworker Carl (Ben Hornstein '11), is obsessed with conserving time and maximizing productivity. In this world, there is no room for any kind of fun, any sense of wonder or any enjoyment of life that doesn't have to do with increasing profits.

The central drama pits Harold, who wants nothing more than to retreat into the vivid world of a colorful musical, against reality. These desires result in a confusing and fragmented structure in which half of the time the play is simply a manifestation of Harold's daydreams and fantasies. This also results in a lot of bizarre and humorous flights of fancy during which the singing and dancing troupe, The New Hat Players, performs satirical numbers that poke fun at the concept of a musical itself and the artifice of the genre. A lot of this is successful because many of the pieces are humorous and entertaining-for example, the play-within-a-play piece about the wife/husband/mistress trio was great-but unfortunately the play still retains some of the flaws of the genre it's trying to satirize, which is always a danger with satires. A satire has to transcend the boundaries of its genre or be particularly incisive in order to criticize effectively. Here, the structure of the musical numbers is overall rather flat-most of them simply meander along at an amiable pace, and although enjoyable, they are occasionally not as engaging as those of some of the best musicals, in part because of the lack of variety of song structure. However, some of the best moments of the play are in the clever details, for instance, the "Disastrous graph"-a hilariously simple visual that added to the satirical note of the play.

As far as characters go, Sludgebottom is a great adversary, played with elastic features and overdrawn wit by Bronk, but he's by far the most interesting character. Harold himself does not hold up as well, because the audience has little insight about his inner character and why he wants to escape so much. Cohen is a great singer but a less fluid actor, and the stiffness in some of his acting may simply have been part of the limitations of his character, because the role is oddly limiting.

Everyone can empathize with the urge to make life more fun and full of art, but most people recognize that there has to be a balance and it doesn't have to be all one way or the other. Like the protagonist of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," both men choose a world of delusion over the mundane reality of their lives. There seems to be little acknowledgment of that middle ground in this play. I don't think Harold! was intended as a profound meditation on the nature and role of art, exactly, although the director's note-wiser, less pretentious and more earnest than many I've read-urged the audience to think deeply about why things were happening onstage. If anything, I would describe Harold! as the meta-theatrical equivalent of a well-sung ditty-light-hearted and unassuming, but certainly not to be mistaken for a grandiose production.