Night Court turns attorneys into actors.
HEATHER HUGHES, FROM LEFT, MATTHEW LESLIE, TARA TAHERI AND RAMON ECHEVARRIA CO-STAR.
There once was a young attorney named George, restless and mired in debt. By day, the second-year associate toiled at the prestigious firm of Timon and Pumbaa, a civil practice whose founders had vanished without a trace some three decades earlier.
But by night, George looked for escape where he could find it. And though some overworked barristers might turn to booze or bad behavior, the tie-wearing 20something turned to board games. It was while playing the innocently — or not so innocently — titled “Law-manji” that he got sucked into the game and found himself in a jungle world filled with cheetahs, lions, snakes and a stray donkey, all mired in questions of legal ethics.
If this story sounds weird, that’s fair. It’s weird as hell, with a splash of nerdiness, a flash of bright costuming and an abundance of law-themed songs — everything needed for a quirky theatrical mash-up of “Jumanji” and “The Lion King” set to Queen parodies and performed by attorneys to raise funds for legal charities.
The 29th production by Night Court: Lawyers Entertaining for Charity’s “The Law of the Jungle II” premiered Wednesday at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts and runs through Saturday. Started in the late ’80s as a skit series for a Houston Bar Association cocktail party, the play has raised more than $1.3 million for various legal charities — including Child Advocates and the Houston Area Women’s Center Children’s Court Services program. It even offers two hours of ethics continuing legal education credit for attorneys who attend.
“We’ve been doing this for 30 years,” said Debra Baker, who’s been helping write the show’s scripts since its inception. “We try to include legal ethics and themes of diversity and inclusion.”
Birds and snakes
The environmental attorney/ backup singer explained it all to me outside a nighttime stage rehearsal while a lawyer in a banana costume strutted by behind us, softly singing “Banana-nananana.”
When Night Court started, attorneys cobbled together the production with 10- and 12-person casts, using original scripts and pop-song parodies. But over the years, the very niche drama has grown its stable of actors, now featuring casts of 60 to 70 barcard-carrying thespians backed by a live orchestra.
There’s only one requirement to participate, explained choreogra
pher Marty Lundstrom: “They all happen to be lawyers who are on the stage,” she said. “That’s our rule, whether they’re practicing or not.”
Dressed in a slinky, skin-tight lion costume, Lundstrom — whose day job is as in-house counsel for an energy company — helped recount the show’s growth over the years, telling how the production added performances and eventually moved from its home at Rice University to the more spacious Hobby Center.
A native Houstonian with a background in dance, the now-42-year-old joined the production just after law school, the first year the show played downtown in the larger venue. As a newbie, she got stuck with a less-than-ideal role: a big yellow bird, wearing a getup purchased at Exotic Cabaret.
“I’m so grateful to have upgraded my role to a lion,” she said with a laugh, summoning over a friend who she warns is a “snake in the grass.”
That would be Martha Jamison the boa, who nearly scares George (Matthew Harper) to death midway through the production.
Defending the law
After the neophyte attorney falls into the game world, he spends the next two hours trying to figure out how to get home. The missing law partners, he soon discovers, are stuck in the game, too.
First, he must teach them ethics as he struggles to meet the jungle’s legal needs — including a queen cat who’s unhappy that a child-support arrangement prevents her from eating her young and a snake who wants help selling her venom — and boot the evil Scar (Matt Leslie) from the throne of the jungle.
It’s a daunting task, and one that requires plenty of musical intervention, including rousing versions of “The Lion King” classics — “Circle of Law” and “Res Judicata” — and Queen hits such as “A Lawyer Rhapsody” and “We Make the Legal World Go ’Round.”
But punny satire aside, it’s the show’s legal-themed messages that the cast points to as the show’s true gems.
Near the end, Nala sums up what she’s learned so far: “To the best of my ability, I will preserve, protect and defend the law of the jungle.”
“I view that as the role of lawyers,” Lundstrom said. “While here, it’s defending the law of the jungle, it’s also defending law in Houston and beyond.”