A freshly cast "An American Hero" made its way up to New York and brought home several awards for SEMO. The Southeast students and alumni spent a week in The Big Apple performing their show in an off-Broadway festival.
The musical tells the story of Thomas O’Brien, an Irish immigrant, who falls in love with an American woman during World War II. It tracks their war efforts overseas and at home. The show explores the hardships of war and being on the homefront and the difficulties of coming back home.
The show participated in the off-Broadway New York Musical Festival July 21-29.
“An American Hero” won three awards: a Special Citation for University Excellence, Best of Festival and Outstanding Individual Performance. It also received a nomination for Outstanding Overall Design.
“Now that we have Best of Fest and all these other accolades on it, it allows not just for each person’s individual career to start succeeding, it allows for the show itself to start succeeding as well,” composer and Southeast alumni Cody Cole said.
The show also won Best of Festival by collecting the most votes online. Adam Schween, who played Thomas, the male lead role, said the cast flooded their social media accounts to get votes.
Additionally, Schween was recognized with the award for Outstanding Individual Performance.
“Some of the best actors of the past few generations who have done the New York Musical Festival [won this award],” he said. “The fact that my performances were able to be considered on the same level as those other performers was really inspiring. It took me from ‘I think I can do this as a career’ to ‘I know I can do this.’”
A lot of preparation went into transitioning from the fall 2017 world-premiere production in the Bedell Performance Hall to the festival. Cole said attention to detail was key.
“The festival has very strict time constraints,” Cole said. “We had to do a lot of major cuts from the original fall production.”
Cole said the show originally ran for two and a half hours including an intermission. The festival has a set two hour limit on a show’s run time, so the intermission and some other big scenes were cut for the festival.
The show was written by Chair of the Jeanine Larson Dobbins Conservatory of Theatre and Dance, Kenn Stilson.
The production had to adapt and find a way to tell the story more efficiently. The grand staircase, ornate bar and other elaborate set designs were all cut out and replaced with enlarged photographs that conveyed the era of WWII.
Cole said the simpler set forced the actors to tell the story vividly through their performances.
“This whole experience has put Southeast’s musical theater program on the map more than ever,” said Josslyn Shaw, who played Mary, the lead female role. “I feel really honored to be a part of that moment in SEMO’s history.”
But before the show made itself at home at the off-Broadway Acorn Theatre, the cast and crew took a 20-hour bus ride from Cape Girardeau to New York City.
Upon arriving in the city, Stilson and his wife Rhonda Weller-Stilson, dean of the Holland College of Art and Media, treated the cast to a dinner at an Irish pub. Schween said it was fitting since the two main characters, Thomas and his brother Paddy, are Irish immigrants.
The next day was full of final preparations and checks to make sure all problems were solved before the show opened. The cast went through a sitzprobe, which involved incorporating the orchestra in with the piano and running through all the music of the show.
“Since there are so many more instruments, the energy rises up even more,” Schween said. “So we all had a ridiculously fun time getting to sing along that time particularly.”
Before each show, the cast and crew split into groups to set up more efficiently. They also had a brief fight call to practice the fight choreography. Schween said the fight calls were necessary to make sure the choreography was still in their bodies because everyone had a tendency to lose themselves within the show.
“There would be so many times that the show would be going on and I was like ‘Oh we are already past that,’” Schween said. “I didn’t have time to think because of how non-stop the show is.”
Cole said he kept one eye on the show and one eye on the audience during each performance due to nerves.
“Beyond working with them in the show itself, I get to hang out with [the actors] outside of the show,” he said. “They aren’t just cast members, they are friends So you always want the best for them as well as wanting the best for your own show.”
What’s next for “An American Hero” is still undecided.
“This is a very high point in my life and something I’m never going to forget until the day I die. It will always stick with me,” Schween said.
