SDSU’s ‘Thrill Me’ honored at theater festival

“Thrill Me,” a fall production by the theatre and dance department at South Dakota State University, lived up to its name for all involved.

The American College Theatre Festival honored it with four national awards and nine national commendations.  

The cast of “Thrill Me” was honored with the Distinguished Performance Ensemble award. Actor Jacob Stevens was honored with the Distinguished Performance in a Play award. Jamison Gross won the award for Distinguished Musical Direction. Professor W. James Wood was honored for Distinguished Direction in a Play or Musical.

The awards are based on how the students performed at a regional conference of the American College Theatre Festival in Rochester, Minnesota, Jan. 20.

It was a weeklong conference, and SDSU was one of four productions selected from a pool of more than 30 for presentation at the festival. The American College Theatre Festival holds eight regional conferences around the nation and at the conclusion of the last festival, the national committee selects the award recipients from all eight regions, said Wood, the associate director of School of Performing Arts at SDSU.

Theater productions have to earn an invitation to the regional conferences. Last year’s SDSU production of “Fuddy Mears” was the first time SDSU had been invited to perform at the regional conference. 

“We were thrilled and honored to be invited to the conference for two consecutive years,” said  Wood. “We took 32 students and four faculty, plus we rented a truck to take the set, so this was quite the undertaking. It’s not often that I make a sports analogy, but this is the theater equivalent of making it to the playoffs.”

In addition to the national awards, the American College Theatre Festival’s National Committee also celebrated the SDSU production with the following meritorious commendations:

• Intimacy Direction – Melissa Hauschild-Mork, associate professor of dance 
• Scenic Design – Thomas Alpers
• Lighting Design – Nick Teal
• Pianist – instructor Anna DeGraff
• Performance – CJ Richards
• Production Design
• Performance and Production Ensemble
• Generosity of Spirit and Collaboration to prepare the space and support other productions
Director of a Musical – W. James Wood

“Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story,” which was produced on the SDSU stage in November, is a musical love story detailing the bond between Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the infamous "thrill killers" of the 1920s who committed one of the most infamous and heinous crimes of the 20th century.

Other members of the cast were Noah Larson and Nick Forster. The production team included Lewhat Tesfaldet, Alex Raether, Reilly Sazdoff, Thomas Alpers, Nick Teal, Samantha Clark, Mollie Moore, Journey Johnson and Dontaevian Aldridge.

Wood said, “These awards are a tremendous honor to the students and our entire department, who put in hundreds of hours on this production in the fall as well as in January. It affirms what we are hearing from incoming students — SDSU is a great place to study theater in South Dakota.”