Curtain Rises Again, This Time on Original Musical: “Topeka or To-Not-Peka”

By Christina Hernandez Sherwood | Photos by Michael DiVito

In the early hours of a Saturday morning last October, Pooja Sonikar, a second-year medical student, completed her exam on the gastrointestinal system, slept for a few hours, then headed to the Alumni Auditorium. She spent the rest of the day—and much of the night—designing stage lighting and sanding a custom-built bar that would be a key set piece in a new musical written, directed, produced, and performed by VP&S students.

A week later, the Broadway Haven Players, the student theater group, presented its first full-length, in-person stage production since early March 2020, when BHP staged “Much Ado About Nothing.” On opening night, Ms. Sonikar told the audience, “We have literally been dusting off equipment to use for our show.”

In its heyday, Broadway Haven Players—known as Bard Hall Players when it was established in the 1960s—put on three shows a year, typically a production of a well-known musical in the fall, a Shakespeare play in the winter, and a modern play in the spring. But the COVID-19 pandemic, along with struggles securing the rights to stage existing musicals, sidelined the group.

That is, until Ms. Sonikar received an email early in her first year at VP&S with news that Broadway Haven Players was looking for a director. A musical theater performer since she began acting in middle school to overcome stage fright, Ms. Sonikar eschewed the stage in college while preparing to apply to medical school. “When I got to medical school, I made a promise to myself that I would do musical theater again,” she says. “It’s a of my identity that I left behind.”

Because of budget and time constraints—and a backlog in the process to get the rights to stage existing musicals—Ms. Sonikar and Broadway Haven Players president Michael Lahiff, also a first-year student at the time, decided they would write an original musical together. Mr. Lahiff, who studied music composition as an undergraduate, played several instruments and had experience as a pit orchestra musician.

In the spring of 2023, the two classmates enrolled in a playwriting course taught by Catherine Rogers, associate director of the Division of Narrative Medicine. The course fulfilled the students’ first-year requirement to complete a seminar in the humanities. Narrative medicine emphasizes the importance of story in medicine, Ms. Rogers says. “Patients don’t come in and say, ‘My BP is 120/80,’” she says. “They come in with a story about how they feel. The skills it takes to read and analyze a story, to write a play, to take a good photograph, to look at a painting by Picasso: Those are not optional, but required, for skillful clinicians.”

During the course, Ms. Sonikar and Mr. Lahiff decided they weren’t writing a musical about medical school (“too on the nose”). Instead, conversations with their playwriting classmates encouraged them to craft a show that explored the universal themes of loss and grief, parent-child relationships, and friendship. But they didn’t avoid medicine altogether. Two characters in the musical, a father and a son, are significantly impacted by the medical illness and subsequent death of their wife and mother

Creating a character in a play helps students imagine themselves walking in someone else’s shoes, a valuable skill for future doctors, Ms. Rogers says. She points to the nuanced characters of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, himself a medical doctor. “Every one of them has flaws. He creates whole people.”

The playwriting students were tasked with writing a 10-minute play (Ms. Sonikar and Mr. Lahiff drafted scenes from their musical), watching their classmates perform it, and revising it based on feedback. “It sounds a lot like rounds,” Ms. Rogers says. “It’s building teamwork, another strength you need as a clinician.”

Ms. Sonikar and Mr. Lahiff received more than critiques from their classmates: By the end of the six week playwriting course, they had all but cast their show with peers. One classmate was cast as the lead, a young man who, having recently lost his mother and become estranged from his father, decides to follow his best friend from New York City to Kansas.

Writing continued into the summer, mostly in the evenings. Though they didn’t have classes, Mr. Lahiff spent summer days working in a laboratory studying a chemical with the potential to reverse brain tumor growth, and Ms. Sonikar developed a quality improvement project for student-run clinics. Another VP&S classmate had connected them to a writing troupe composed of Princeton University alumni who served as consultants on the project and guided their progress over the summer.

By the fall, what started as the kernel of an idea for a stage show had become “Topeka or To-Not-Peka,” a modern coming-of-age story that follows two friends on their adventures, and misadventures, in the rural Midwest. Over two-and-a-half hours, and through many sweeping musical numbers, the main characters and supporting cast find themselves accidentally buying a failing business, becoming entangled in a bisexual love triangle, and coming to terms with a debilitating mental health condition.

For two months, the cast and crew of about 30 students, mostly medical students, met for three two-hour rehearsals each week, with occasional schedule changes to accommodate second-year exams. Ms. Sonikar was director, and Mr. Lahiff was composer and musical director. The rest of the cast included actors, choreographers, musicians, producers, and crew members.

One of the producers was Peter Calvaresi, a fourth-year medical student who had joined Broadway Haven Players in the fall of 2021, when the group was preparing to stage the musical “Legally Blonde.” But a week before showtime, the cast learned that the production had been canceled because the group hadn’t received the rights to perform it. In an attempt to salvage the hours they had devoted to rehearsing for the show, several cast members performed songs from the musical at Coffeehouse, a VP&S Club open-mic style gathering that showcases the musical, spoken word, comedic, and kinesthetic talents of students from across the medical center.

For Mr. Calvaresi, “Topeka or To-Not-Peka” was a rare chance to revive the VP&S theater group. “I wanted to see this community continue to exist on campus, and hopefully one day thrive again,” he says. “Med school is obviously a very stressful time. Broadway Haven Players is a great way to have that outlet of creative expression when the rest of our days are math and science and sometimes sad cases in the hospital. You use a different part of your brain, and your heart.”

Despite Ms. Sonikar’s worries about dusty, long unused equipment, opening night on Friday, Oct. 27, went off practically without a hitch. At curtain call, the cast was met with a standing ovation. But the most rapturous cheers came when Ms. Sonikar and Mr. Lahiff stepped onstage to accept floral bouquets from their beaming cast and crew. Then they did it all again the next night.

“Everyone dedicated themselves to this product that we made,” Mr. Lahiff says. “I’m getting chills thinking about the work so many people had to do to make this thing happen.”

Although the curtain has come down on their Fall 2023 performances, Ms. Sonikar and Mr. Lahiff say they aren’t finished with “Topeka or To-Not-Peka.” The pair is drafting a submission to JAMA’s Arts and Medicine section about their experience on the show, emphasizing the importance of creative outlets in medical education.

“Staying in touch with the arts keeps us human,” Ms. Sonikar says. “It’s very easy to reduce a person to lab values and forget about the person behind that story and to forget about the impact a provider can have on a person’s narrative. A doctor’s visit can change your entire life course.”

There’s also talk of recording a cast album— a Columbia dental student offered the use of the recording studio he has on a bus—and perhaps one day performing the show again.

“The show meant a lot to us, but it also meant a lot to our classmates,” Ms. Sonikar says, as the production offered the students an opportunity to trade the rigors of medical school for the rigors of creating musical theater as well as a reprieve from more global concerns, such as the Israel-Hamas War. “One of our cast and crew members said, ‘The show saved my mental health.’”