Looking to cash in on arthouse cinema’s hottest trend, this year’s production of the student-directed musical Gaieties, titled “Trees,” will star a live-action Stanford Tree and Cal Bear, according to a first-look trailer released this week.
Gaieties 2019 — long a Big Game Week tradition — will be the stage debut of “digital foliage technology,” designed by Stanford’s vaunted computer science department.
“They gave us the option to fix Axess or animate trees, and of course we chose this,” said professor Mehran Sahami, whose past credits include “Karel: In Search of Love.”
According to industry insiders, this year’s plot will hew closely to last year’s “Jane Stanford and the Chamber of Secrets,” with some disgruntled crew members calling the show “essentially a shot-for-shot remake.”
However, in a featurette showing the cast dutifully rehearsing, Gaieties advisor and Senior Vice Provost for Education Harry Elam said the production was “a sequoia-sized leap in terms of studio technology.”
Elam declined to comment on how photorealistic CGI counted as live action and referred all further inquiries to the Notes from the Quad blog — which in turn linked to a bizarre Wikipedia page listing every Disney remake of an animated film.
In the meantime, the Stanford community hasn’t been shy about weighing in. Students took to Twitter and Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees in the hours after the trailer was posted to ask the most pressing questions on everyone’s mind.
“why do the trees have breasts,” posted hardforcard6969 on Twitter. “trees don’t lactate. i learned that studying for the mcat.”
How Ram’s Head, the company producing the musical, was able to sign pop star Taylor Swift to play the Cal Bear has been a topic of frequent speculation. Swift will be paid out of Stanford’s $26 billion endowment, tipsters tell The Daily. According to multiple sources, Swift has also written a new single for the production, “You Need to Calm Down Because Everyone Else Is Already Calm and You’re the Only One Who’s Stressed: The Stanford Duck Syndrome Story.”
Rumors that Beyonce will play the Tree’s love interest are, unfortunately, unconfirmed.
Additionally, despite multiple furry-themed memes to the contrary, gossip that “Gaieties: Trees” is a collaboration with the Sexual Health Peer Resource Center and Kardinal Kink appears to be just that.
“We didn’t ask for this,” wrote Kardinal Kink in a letter to The Daily. “We don’t want this. Please don’t associate this with us.”
But viewership for the November premiere promises to be as high as ever: “I’m still gonna get trashed and yell at everyone to make out,” said an anonymous Greek life member who agreed to be identified only as “Frat Star.”
Gaieties will open in Memorial Auditorium the Wednesday before Big Game — granted Big Game is not postponed again due to a layer of suffocating ash blanketing the Bay Area.
Contact Erin Woo at erinkwoo ‘at’ stanford.edu.
Editor’s note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.