Super Hero Show
2015 · Lincoln Land Community College
The Super Hero Show was the fall 2015 production of Ken Bradbury's Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre class — an original, G-rated children's play built around a troupe of costumed superheroes. As with each year's "On The Road" show, Ken wrote the script for his college students and then took the company touring to elementary schools across the Jacksonville, Illinois area. A later class program recalled that the troupe "toured 16 different elementary schools with their Super Hero play," part of a season that totaled two dozen performances for thousands of young audience members.
Ken's class journal records the show coming together over the summer and fall of 2015: digging through child-sized and adult costumes at Party City and other shops in search of capes and masks, fitting students into Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, Waldo, and Ninja Turtle costumes at the Methodist church, and ordering wigs and props by the daily UPS truckload. He kept the staging family-friendly ("I've got to keep this show G-rated"), reworking costume gags that ran too risqué for the grade-school crowd. The play was devised under tight conditions, with the cast list still in flux as students registered through LLCC and Triopia right up to the start of class.
The Story
The full script follows Lily, a clumsy girl who feels she's good at nothing and wishes she could be a superhero. Helga — Elsa's second cousin, who keeps trying to sing "Let It Go" but can't remember the words — phones up a whole parade of heroes from her cell phone: Batman and Robin (Batman keeps calling Robin the wrong name — Tonto, SpongeBob, Nemo, Shrek — and shrugging "Whatever"), the Flash, Where's Waldo, Dora the Explorer, the Hulk, Spiderman, a Ninja Turtle, the Minions, and a Super Music Man. Lily turns each one down — they hurt people, never stop to make a friend, leave home, or are just plain scary — until her friends help her see that her real super power is being nice and making people happy. Even Helga learns to be a little kinder.
Songs and Numbers
The show is built around borrowed and parody pop-culture tunes, in performance order:
- Lily's wish — "Did you ever just wish you could just raise your fist and Zowie!"
- "Let It Go" (from Frozen) — Helga's aborted Elsa lip-sync
- Batman Theme — the caped-crusader entrance
- "The Flash" — a drum-beat build, then "Flash!" and he appears
- Dora the Explorer theme — "Dora dora dora the explorer!"
- "I've Been Everywhere" — reworked with local Illinois town names (Jacksonville, Beardstown, Chapin, Arenzville, Winchester, Springfield, Quincy, Lincoln…)
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme — a lip-synced rap with karate kicks and flips
- Minions — two minions dance out
- The Music Man — "The power of music, man! It can make you happy… excited… sad… scared"
- "Our Favorite Son" — a hat dance
- Finale: "You're So Much Fun" — "You're so much fun! You're number one! You are our very favorite hero…"
The script localizes for each stop with fill-in-the-blank slots for the grade level, school, and principal's name (e.g., "faster than Mr./Mrs. ___ in a fire drill"), and pulls children up to quiz the Hulk and Spiderman and to vote on giving Helga another chance.
Cast
The first-semester class list assigned superhero roles to the troupe:
- Brenan Pool — Batman (and one of the lead "all the superheroes" performers)
- Kyler Miller — Spiderman / The Flash (and lead superhero performer)
- Matthew Thurman — Hulk
- Kira Sayre — Ninja Turtle
- MacKenzie Musch — Helga
- Ally Bunfill
- Elly Crawford
- Katia Janes
- Abigail Link
- Bailey Littleton
- Kamryn Portwood
- Rachel Skillett
- Hannah Werries
- Ben Stanberry
- Emily Burns
Additional characters and costume bits noted for the show included Robin, Waldo, the Penguin, Dora the Explorer, the Music Man, and Minions.
Production Notes
This was the fall semester production of the 2015–16 LLCC Traveling Theatre class. The company performed it on tour to 16 area elementary schools — among them schools in North Jacksonville, Franklin, Beardstown, Roodhouse, Murrayville, Winchester, Meredosia, Triopia, and across Jacksonville — before turning in the spring to the class's history play. Because the subject matter changed each year, students could enroll in the class repeatedly for college credit. The full script survives in the class folder, complete from the opening welcome through the curtain call with all of its music cues, along with the class lists, the performance tour schedule, and Ken's class journal entries about costuming and rehearsals.
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