Several members of the cast of “Hair” may be making their last stage appearances in Southwest Florida. That’s because they’re heading to college in a few weeks to pursue degrees in musical theater.
Lucas Campero is a member of that group. He plays Claude.
“I went to FGCU my first two years,” said Campero. “I’m going into my junior year at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. Next semester. I’ll be taking seven theater classes. When I was at FGCU, I was a double major … more on the business course load. So now that I’m transferring over as strictly musical theater, they want to try to catch me up to speed with everyone else.”
Although Campero will be 20 minutes outside Philadelphia, his goal is Broadway.
“Really, any theater,” Campero clarified. “I’ve been really passionate the last decade doing theater. I’ve been a fan of anything - film, stage. I’m obviously a fan of musical theater.”
Abby Young plays Dee.
“Next year I will be a freshman studying musical theater at Belmont University in Nashville.”
She, too, has her sights set on Broadway.
“After graduation, I plan to move to New York,” said Young. “Probably with some of the people in my class, we’ll get an apartment. Yeah, move to New York and live out the dream.”
Hadley Murphy plays Jeanie in “Hair.”
“I’m going to Yale to study theater and philosophy.”
Murphy doesn’t aspire to be on Broadway, at least not as an actor.
“I really would like to work in directing or writing for film, TV or for theater,” Murphy declared. “I think that would be extremely interesting. But wherever the wind takes me. I really have enjoyed acting in this show. More so than other shows. And I really enjoy singing. Really want to keep a hand in that.”
WHERE/WHEN TO SEE THEM: Don’t miss what may very well be their final show in Southwest Florida. “Hair” is onstage at the Arts Bonita Performing Arts Center July 11 to 20.
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Lucas Campero plays the part of Claude in “Hair.” Claude is the best known and most popular member of the Tribe.
“So the Tribe is one big family,” Campero explains. “It’s a group of people who don’t conform to the norms of society in the world of the play. It’s just people who want to be free. They want to be who they are, who they want to be, and it’s nice that they’re able to express themselves in a group of people that all feel the same way. So there’s no judgment. It’s a nice place to be.”
Everyone likes hanging with Claude. But there’s a side of his personality that he guards and keeps private.
“There’s a bit more to him that people don’t really see,” Campero observed. “He has these inner thoughts that he keeps to himself; that he doesn’t really like to share with anyone else. It’s fun to play that double personality type of role.”
The Tribe, to a person, is against the Vietnam War. Some, like Berger (Declan Ireland) refuse to be drafted, and vow to burn their draft cards and go to Canada rather than be conscripted into the Army. Claude is conflicted. He’s not sure he’s on board with resisting the draft, and as a result, he doesn’t know if he’s truly part of the Tribe.
“He doesn’t know if he wants to be part of the Tribe or if he’s just kind of there. He’s still kind of figuring that out.”
Campero believes that “Hair” is as relevant today as it was when it made it debut Off Broadway in 1967.
“It’s very, very important that the story gets shared,” Campero said. “There’s so many ties to today, where recently we’ve seen a lot of protests and division. So I think it’s important that people understand that it’s okay to protest, and important to know that history can’t be forgotten. Kody [Jones] does a really good job with picking these type of shows that depict problems that existed in the past but they have some kind of relation to what’s going on today.”
After “Hair” closes, Campero is off to New Jersey to attend Rowan College.
“I’ve visited the campus a couple of times,” Campero said. “It’s beautiful. It’s definitely different from Florida. When I was there it was 60 degrees in August. It was great. They’ve been nothing but amazing to me. They took me in. They introduced me to a lot of students in the day and a half I was there, and at the end of the month I’m going up there for my orientation, kind of getting situated and moving in officially.”
Campero emphasized that he enjoyed his time at Florida Gulf Coast University and would have preferred to finish his studies there.
“I had the time of my life here the past two years. The campus is beautiful. The professors are excellent. But FGCU does not have a musical theater track, which is really the career I want to pursue and so, just with the lack of that, I felt that it was time to make a change.”
Campero also expressed curiosity about what it will be like to live someplace else.
“I’ve lived in Florida all my life, so that’s another reason for the change. Let’s see what’s out there, what opportunities are out there for me? Plus, it gets me closer to these big city areas. Overall, just opportunity wise, I’ll get a lot more out of there than here.”
Unlike castmates Abby Young and Hadley Murphy, Campero didn’t have to record pre-screen videos or attend auditions. It was simply a matter of gathering and forwarding transcripts of the courses he’s completed at FGCU and finding out how many of the credits he’s earned at FGCU will transfer to Rowan.
At Arts Bonita, Campero tried his hand at stage management with “The Boy from Block 66” and, just last month for “Fiddler on the Roof JR.”
“I would be OK never to do it again,” Campero said, laughing.
But the experience with those shows did give him new insight into how to make the jobs of design team members easier.
“The way I now perceive my role as an actor is to make it as easy as I can for the design team while still putting on the image that the director wants me to do.”
His two stints stage managing also reinforced Campero’s passion for acting.
“It’s such a great way to express yourself. I’ve never been a paint-on-the-canvas type of guy. I’ve always been pretty bad at art, but this is the one art form that I’ve always enjoyed doing because you’re not just playing a character, learning a couple of lines and just going out and delivering them. You’re learning the story, becoming the person the character is. And it’s so much fun to see the looks on people’s faces in the audience and hear the laughs when doing a comedic line or hearing gasps or just reactions. Hearing all that kind of stuff and seeing it, it’s so much fun to do, I wouldn’t ask for anything else.”
Campero’s stage credits include the role of Melchior Gabor in “Spring Awakening” and Reuben/Pharaoh in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Abby Young
“Hair” is Abby Young’s first official summer stock show. She’s been particularly inspired by the members of Jones and Brauer’s cast who are already in college and are back to share their experiences and insights.
Young’s transition from high school to college admission followed the usual path of a musical theater B.F.A. aspirant.
“I auditioned for a ton of schools,” Young said, settling on 20. “Musical theater programs are very competitive. Belmont was one of the first schools that I looked into. I did an intensive there and got to know some of the professors and I really just loved the school and the campus. And of course, it’s in Nashville, the heart of Music City. So there’s a bunch of opportunities for not only an actor but a singer like myself. Me and my cowboy boots are going to take on Nashville.”
Gaining admission into a college musical theater B.F.A. program typically involves going through either an in-person or videotaped “pre-screen” that affords the school and the applicant an opportunity to see if their program is a good fit for both. Those who pass the pre-screen are then invited to audition, and those who pass the audition are given one or more interviews. It’s a grueling, anxiety-provoking process as most musical theater programs limit their freshman classes to just 15 to 25 seats.
“I went to a unified pre-screen in St. Louis and then I did unified auditions in Chicago, but I traveled to most of the places in Florida to do my auditions in person,” said Young. “It definitely was very nerve-wracking because you have two minutes to put out all of your talent to see if you’re good enough to be accepted into the program.”
Adding to the stress was the fact that each school has its own requirements. The song selection is different from one school to the next, as are the types of monologues they want to see. Each school also has its own submission deadlines.
“So keeping track of that was a lot of work,” Young said.
But Young learned a great deal about herself during the application process.
“It’s groomed me as a performer and as a person," Young said. “It taught me how to manage my nerves and how to deal with the stress. Being the perfectionist that I am, it was definitely difficult because not every audition can be perfect no matter how much you may want it to be. So it was definitely difficult, but I feel very prepared now. I don’t regret the experience at all. It was a place for me to grow with all of that.”
Perhaps the biggest lessons she derived from her experiences are balance and perspective.
“I learned that’s is really important to take time for myself to get ready and be prepared before and also after auditions – kind of like letting go, breathing and keeping in mind that it’s just an audition. Auditions don’t determine your worth as a performer or your value as a person. So it’s kind of taking time afterwards to breathe, sit with it for a while, and then move on to the next thing.”
Young said she’s been performing since she was 3. Her first show was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
“My sister was in this show and my mom was helping with some of the costumes. I came along with my mom. The director noticed me watching and put me in one little scene. I just kind of fell in love and I haven’t stopped since.”
Among Young’s stage credits at Arts Bonita are the roles of Mary Magdalene in “Jesus Christ Superstar," Woman 1 in the world premiere of “The Boy from Block 66,” Fate 2 in “Hadestown Teen Edition” and the Narrator in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“It was actually coming here to Arts Bonita that fueled my passion and gave me the confidence that I can do this as a career,” said Young. “Prior to that, it was a dream up in the clouds – ‘Oh, I’ll go to New York. I’ll be a dancer there. Or a singer.’ But it always seemed out of reach. Like it wasn’t really for me. But coming here to Arts Bonita, being around all these people who are so passionate about it and have the same talent and the same drive as I do really just fueled me to know that I can do this as a career and this is a path that I can take.”
Although she acknowledges that “Hair” could be her last time on the Arts Bonita stage, she does entertain the possibility of returning in the summers.
“Unless I do summer stock somewhere else,” she equivocated. “I heard some of titles that Kody and Joseph are planning to produce next summer, and I love the community that I have here. All are my best friends. We’ve all become just really close with all the shows we’ve done.”
Hadley Murphy
Hadley Murphy plays Jeanie.
“Visually, the thing that most stands out about Jeanie is she’s pregnant,” noted Murphy, who wears a belly during her performances. “It’s not super big, but it’s definitely visible. So when we’re doing our character analysis for the show, there’s something called the super objective and you choose one word that is all encompassing about the character and then you pair a visual with that. I bounced around a couple of times, so my word for Jeanie is ‘nurturing.’ So that’s the role she plays in the Tribe. She is always supporting others, no matter what. She’s like a mom.”
Along those lines, Murphy’s character doesn’t just support the Tribe, which is “very anti-war, very pro-peace, which I would agree with, my character would agree with.” She’s also adamant about accepting and supporting the vets who are returning from Vietnam – not a popular position within the Tribe.
“But they not only had to go there and risk dying, they had to see all the atrocities, watch other people die and experience that. But she wants to support everyone, no matter what side they’re on and that what distinguishes her in the Tribe.”
Murphy expressed appreciation for the way Kody Jones and Joseph Brauer blocked and choreographed the show's myriad musical numbers, which are intentionally discordant most of the time.
“Our concept for the show is to emphasize that the Tribe has kind of escaped all reality,” Murphy observed. “Actually, that’s the whole point of the Tribe. It’s to escape from the stresses, the worries, the anxieties of everything that’s going on outside - the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War, political conflict and everything else going on at that time. They’re trying to escape that and find some peace and harmony instead – peace and harmony amidst all of the worries and the anxieties and the conflict. That’s why everyone’s doing all these drugs. We’re trying to escape from that, not only geographically [by being sequestered in tents, barrels and trees in Central Park], but spiritually and psychologically.”
As Jones and Brauer intended when they decided to produce “Hair,” Murphy approached her preparation for the show from a historical perspective.
“This era in time was one of my favorite to learn about in history class,” Young said. “We actually read a book in one of my classes called ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien. It’s a fictional book, but Tim O’Brien, the author, went to Vietnam and served in the war and he’s sharing all these fictional stories about what happened in the war. So I channel all of that in playing my character. And it also parallels a lot of what’s going on right now with the wars in the Mideast and the Ukraine. So I think that it is almost like a time travel kind of thing where you can look at history, you can look at that period of time and see how it relates to what we’re going through right now, and you can kind of feel that counterculture going on in Gen Z that we’re displaying onstage.”
Murphy expressed admiration for those of her castmates who have decided to pursue Bachelor of Fine Art degrees at schools like the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon and the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. But she opted to get a bachelor of arts instead.
“My major is more of an all-encompassing. So while I will be learning acting and singing, I am also really interested in directing and playwriting and being a lyricist. Writing about stories and writing stories, that’s very interesting to me.”
Yale allows her to pursue that track in depth.
In all, Murphy applied to 15 schools. Because she wasn’t applying for admission into a musical theater B.F.A. program, she did not have to go the pre-screen route.
“But I did something very similar to that,” said Murphy. “I sent in as part of my application a couple of videos of me singing and a couple of videos from a show. Some schools were a little more specific. But for Yale, I sent in one musical theater song, one pop song and a foreign language opera song. I sent similar versions of that to some of the other schools. I think I filmed about five different songs at home that I ended up putting in different places and clips of me from shows.”
Learning that she’d been accepted into Yale was more emotional for her mom than it was for her.
“There’s a video of my mom screaming and crying,” Murphy disclosed. “I had a really good feeling about [getting in]. My vocal coach went there and majored in theater, so he told me a lot about different things that they have there so I could include those in my essays about why I’d be a good fit for the school. He really helped me understand the culture that I was going into, so I had a picture in my mind of what things would be like.”
Like many other schools, Yale notifies applicants of their acceptance by letter sent via email.
“But they also send a video that they want you to see. I saw that I got the video first. So I was, ‘Oh, I got the video!’ I kept saying ‘I got the video! I got the video!’ I had my family on Facetime, and they didn’t know what that meant. In my mind, video meant acceptance, but they didn’t get that, and I was like, I got accepted, and so then they finally understood everything, and my mom started screaming and crying. It was very exciting.”
At Yale, Murphy intends to major in both theater and philosophy.
“I like philosophy because I really like the study of human nature, how people interact with each other, how humans have interacted with each other, how that has changed since the beginning, since we were first created, what people think about religion, about how we were first created. That is all very, very interesting to me. So while I don’t know that much about it, I want to learn more so that I can become an actual thinker about these things. I want to be more than an echo chamber of other people’s thoughts. I want to be able to think for myself.”
Along those lines, Murphy invites people to come see the show.
“’Hair’ definitely will make people think. I think it is the most important show that I’ve ever done. Important meaning everyone in the audience will get something from the show. Everyone in the audience will have some sort of relation to the show if they lived in the time or they’re seeing the parallels to what’s going on right now.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
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