Tom Beard, Look What You Done!
2010 · Beardstown Elks Club, Beardstown, Illinois
When Lincoln Land Community College theatre instructor Ken Bradbury went looking for the story of Beardstown, he found something rare. "Some towns come into being because of a railroad, or a rich farming potential," he said, "but to find a town in Illinois that was pretty much created by a single man… well, that's unusual. I knew there had to be a good story there somewhere." That yearlong search through letters, diaries, and speeches became Tom Beard, Look What You Done! — a new musical written with composer Roger Wainwright of Chatham.
The show follows young Thomas Beard, who journeyed to the area now known as Beardstown in 1819, when Illinois itself was barely a year old. He found not empty wilderness but a rich Native American civilization and a landscape of six burial mounds ringed by swampland. The musical traces the Beard (originally "Baird") family's hard westward trek from New York, their years on Ohio's Cuyahoga River, and Thomas's eventual founding of a ferry across the Illinois River. "It's an adventure tale that Disney would have appreciated," Bradbury said — a story of Indian mounds, wars, snake dens, and riverboats. "Again and again my actors will interrupt the rehearsal to stop and ask me, 'Did this really happen?' 'Did people really live like this?'"
The piece was built as a class project for the WREC theatre troupe, a nineteen-member ensemble of high-school and college students who rehearsed the show as part of their regular coursework. "I've been blessed with some especially strong singing voices this semester," Bradbury said, "so the tale of Thomas Beard sort of screamed out for music."
Musical Numbers
- Memories of a River
- Ferry Song
- Hitch Up the Wagons
- Windy Night
- Goodbye My Friend
- Doodle
- Traveling West
- Coming Upon the Mounds
- Coming of the Snakes
- Nervous Horse
- Marriage Music
- Skinny Dippin'
- Big Freeze
- Indian Lore
- Steamboat Comin'
- Showboat
- Tough Times
- Flood
- Family River Theme
Cast
- Thomas Beard — John Love
- Jedidiah Baird — Phillip Whited
- Narrator / Edward Beard — Logan Bobb
- Caroline Beard — Jessica Clinton
- Sarah Bell — Annie Schone
- Colonel Murray McConnel / accordion — Brock Gwaltney
- Guitar / Clerk / ferry horseman — Kyle Cummings
- Battle narrator / John Moses — Ryan Harris
- Starving Child / banjo — Wes Burton
- George Price / Indian dancer — Michael Roegge
- Rigley — Billie Smith
- Lonely River Singer / Beard boy — Dalton Kindred
With ensemble members Kim Troxell, K. Cummings, R. Harris, D. Kindred, J. West, H. Westrope, E. Washington, K. Taylor, B. Vahle, L. Waldon, M. Roegge, and others of the Lincoln Land class.
Production Notes
Tom Beard, Look What You Done! was written and directed by Ken Bradbury, with additional music by composer Roger Wainwright of Chatham. It was presented by the Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre (WREC theatre class) on February 20 and 21, 2010, at the Beardstown Elks Club — an evening performance at 7:30 p.m. on the 20th and a 3 p.m. matinee on the 21st.
The cast was drawn from across the region — Triopia, Routt, Jacksonville, Franklin, and home-school students — most taking the class for dual high-school and college credit. Several were members of the band Seven Stories High; when Bradbury decided the score needed an accordion, he simply handed the instrument to Brock Gwaltney, who learned it overnight. The same troupe's other projects that year included We Can Change the World and Return to Knollwood, an oral-history piece built from interviews with elderly residents of Jacksonville.
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