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.
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. No full script for the Super Hero Show survives in the class folder; the production is documented through the class lists, the performance tour schedule, and Ken's class journal entries about costuming and rehearsals.