If law schools had credit lists, Harvard’s would look rather impressive. I am not talking about all the brainy lawyers who attended the institution—a group that includes five of the nine justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court (six if you count Ginsburg, who transferred out)—and I’m certainly not talking about Alb­erto Gonzales. I’m talking about the countless showbiz roles the school has had in movies and television shows. Consider Ally McBeal, The Practice, Sex and the City, Quiz Show, Matlock, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Firm, The Paper Chase, Love Story, and my favorite, Rubeusutori in Habeodeu (you know, the Korean TV series).

Yale Law School, on the other hand, seems curiously under-portrayed in the dramatic arts, though rumor has it that one of its graduates has been trying for years to get financing to stage a musical called Thoroughly Modern Tort.

Harvard has recently landed perhaps its most super-starring part of all: the new Broadway musical Legally Blonde, about a golden-haired sorority queen from Malibu who gets dumped by her Harvard Law School-bound boyfriend and decides she will win him back by attending the school, too. The musical is based, of course, on the blockbuster movie, which was based, incidentally, on a book set at Stanford. When Stanford Law School declined to have anything to do with the movie, the producers offered it up to Chicago Law School, which also said no. (Both schools objected to the scene in which a law professor attempts to seduce a student.)

Harvard, apparently, had no qualms about this plot point. Nor did officials mind the detail of a student who insists on taking her dog to class. As for the Broadway version, the university must have felt confident the school would be justly depicted, since the music and lyrics are written by two Harvard College graduates—the married team of Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe, whose earliest joint credit was the 1993 Hasty Pudding show. They did a fair amount of research, Benjamin told me recently—peppering friends who’d gone to Harvard Law with questions about their experiences and spending some time up in Cambridge, where they learned, for instance, that one hopeful fellow came to his admissions interview dressed in a lobster suit, explaining that he wanted to go to the “Claw School” (he was not accepted).

There is, however, a limit to how true to life a musical about a law school can be. “Not a whole lot of singing and dancing goes on in classrooms,” said Benjamin, giving one example.

Just how close did the musical get to the real thing? I went to Harvard as an under­graduate, but the nearest I ever got to the law school was watching my roommate bomb the LSATs. I therefore invited a friend of mine who had gone to Harvard Law School, and is now a high-powered Park Avenue litigator, to accompany me to a preview of Legally Blonde. Let’s call him Mr. Sue.

“Fairly accurate likeness of the architecture of Hauser Hall,” my friend whispered to me during a scene set at what, to me, looked like a nondescript ivy-covered red-brick building. He tapped me on the shoulder. “Before they installed the new windows, that is.” A woman craned her neck around and looked disdainfully at us. “And they got the prissy, arro­gant, uptight Vivienne character right,” he said, referring, I think, to the actress onstage. My friend was okay with the widespread use of laptops in Professor Callahan’s classroom, but he was incensed by the idea that a professor would also be a partner at a billion-dollar law firm, or that there would be ruthless competition among first-year students to get an internship with him. “The real rivalry is getting on Law Review,” he told me. Someone somewhere said “Shhh.”

I knew something was up when Mr. Sue threw down his Playbill toward the end of the first act. “Socrates would be asking for a Venti Hemlock if they saw how they butchered his Method! And what the heck does ‘legally blonde’ mean anyway?” “It’s a comedy,” I said. Gulping down his second Pink Lady during intermission, he said, “Law school was not funny. It’s extremely tedious. They left that part out.”

There may have been a split jury on the verisimilitude, but there was unanimous agreement about the show’s star. Laura Bell Bundy is not a Harvard graduate, but she is nevertheless smart and winning.

Although I am not yet legally blonde, merely artificially brunette, I was allowed to observe her during a photo shoot for the cover of 02138. Not only that—I had the privilege of asking Bundy a few questions while she wriggled this way and that in front of the camera, just mom­ents before she was to give her all for two-and-a-half hours onstage at the Palace Theatre.

Bundy, who is 26 but looks, oh, 22, made her stage debut at age nine in the off-Broadway hit Ruthless!, originating the role of Tina Denmark, for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination. More recently, she has had major parts in the Broadway musicals Hairspray and Wicked, which, along with Legally Blonde, showed off her flowing Goldilocks locks. Bundy’s song and dance talents are so abundant, though, that she could handily fill in for Yul Brynner in The King and I should alopecia strike.

“Before we begin,” I told Bundy, “I must inform you that you have the right to remain silent, though I really wish you wouldn’t.” Bundy gamely removed the cough drop from her mouth and spoke up. Is she a natural blonde? “For the most part, yes; though I do get highlights.” Has the experience of playing the part of a crackerjack law student made her wish she’d gone to Harvard Law School? “I always told my dad I’d go to Harvard, though not necessarily to bec­ome a lawyer, and yes, I guess I’d be curious to go to the law school. But I hear it’s majorly brutal.” Any advice for the current dean of HLS, who’s both a woman and a brunette? “Never und­erestimate a blonde.” Does she ever wear pink clothes? “Now I do. It’s all I have!” Does she think that Harvard’s signature crimson color should be changed to pink? “Definitely!” Any legal qualifications for undertaking the role of Elle Woods? “Um…” Has she, for instance, gotten a lot of parking tickets? “Oh, yes.” Paid them all? “I don’t know about all of them, but I’ve certainly spent a lot of money.” Is she concerned about the stereotype of blondes? “No, because the stupidest person I ever met was a brunette.”