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An ‘80s flashback

SMSU Theater to present ‘The Awesome ‘80s Prom’

Photo by Cindy Votruba The Southwest Minnesota State University Theater Department is presenting an interactive play “The Awesome ‘80s Prom.” The actors watched movies and music videos from the 1980s to prepare for the show.

MARSHALL — It’s back to the high school prom in 1989 for the last show of the season for Southwest Minnesota State University Theater.

All the characters from ’80s movies will be there — the captain of the football team, the class president, the cheerleaders, the foreign exchange students and the geeks. DJ Johnny Hughes will also be spinning the hits from the decade from “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” to “Hey Mickey” to “Come on Eileen.”

The Southwest Minnesota State University Theater Department is presenting “The Awesome ’80s Prom” at 7:30 p.m. today-Saturday, and April 19-21, and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 22, in the SMSU Conference Center lower level. The show is being directed by SMSU theater professor Sheila Tabaka.

“It’s an interactive play set at prom,” Tabaka said. The actors interact with the audience, and audience members can participate as much as they want to.

Dean Zinda and Sariah Cheadle play Michael Jay and Melissa Ann “Missy” Martin in the show. Missy is the head of the prom committee, while her boyfriend, Michael, is the class president.

“We have a wide variety of characters in the show,” Cheadle said. “Things will be happening throughout the night.”

To prepare for the show, Cheadle and Zinda said the actors watched a lot of movies from the 1980s, such as “16 Candles,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Say Anything.” There were also trivia games, Zinda said.

“A lot of it was our own research,” Zinda said. Cheadle said they also watched ’80s music videos and read magazines and books.

Jaylee Schanus, who plays Kerrie Kowalkski in the show, said they had to give up their phones during rehearsals to give them a chance to be used to not using their phones.

“Another thing we did was, when we were rehearsing, we played some Atari games to get a handle on the systems,” Schanus said.

The characters have their own backstory. Cheadle said Missy and Michael had watched the prom together during their freshman year.

Zinda said his character is a young Republican, so he went to YouTube to watch some of Ronald Reagan’s speeches when he served as president.

Whittney McCamish plays Molly Parker, a freshman helping out at the prom. She said her character wants to be involved.

“She’s eager to please,” McCamish said. “She wants to help with everything.”

Schanus said her character, a nerd, came to her easily.

“She and I are very similar, in the sense that I was very much like her in high school,” she said. “A lot of the research that was put into Kerrie was about what kinds of things a nerd would be interested in in the ’80s. Kerrie is a very enthusiastic and happy girl that is obsessed with Blake Williams.”

Schanus said she likes being able to develop a character on her own rather than being given a fully fleshed-out character.

“It isn’t very often that we, as actors, get a chance to make up most of the backstory of a character,” she said.

The show is half-scripted and part un-scripted, Cheadle said. There’s a “free-form section,” Zinda said, where the actors have an outline of what has to happen during the show’s action.

During the course of the show, characters are vying for prom queen and king, and prom-goers, including the audience, are encouraged to vote.

“They decide the outcome of the play,” Tabaka said.

“The Awesome ’80s Prom” is not a show they’ve done before, Cheadle said.

“So experiencing that has been a huge learning experience,” she said.

Zinda and Cheadle said to come to the show open-minded and to have fun.

“It’s a show where you want to get up and dance,” Cheadle said.

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