SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. — Two years after he made his college stage debut as a sophomore in a dark comedy about astronauts, Lusby’s Hermes Johns is stepping into a Broadway musical.
Johns, a Patuxent High School graduate and now a junior acting major at Slippery Rock University, has been cast as Sheldon Saperstein in the university theatre department’s production of “The Prom,” which runs Nov. 20-22 in western Pennsylvania, according to a Slippery Rock University announcement released Nov. 5.
The role marks a step up in profile for a Calvert County performer the Chronicle first wrote about in October 2024, when he was part of the cast of SRU’s black-box staging of “Astronots,” a Mora Harris comedy performed in the school’s small Stoner East theater. “The Prom” is a full-scale musical with song-and-dance numbers, staged in the university’s main Performing Arts Center.
The role
“The Prom” follows four fading Broadway stars who, desperate to repair their images, latch onto a controversy in a small Indiana town where a high school has canceled its prom rather than let a student bring her girlfriend. The stars descend on the town to make a cause of it, and themselves.
Saperstein is the stars’ publicist and agent, a fast-talking, hard-working supporting part that theater guides list as one of the show’s comic-relief roles and a catalyst for the plot, according to the StageAgent character profile.
The show opened on Broadway in 2018, earned seven Tony Award nominations including Best Musical and won the Drama Desk Award for Best Musical. Netflix released a film version in 2020. The original production was directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, the university noted.
When and where
The university has scheduled four performances in the Miller Theater of its Performing Arts Center:
- 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 20
- 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21
- 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22
Tickets are sold online through the university. Slippery Rock is about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh, roughly a five-hour drive from Calvert County, so the performances are not in Southern Maryland.
From Calvert stages to a theater degree
Johns comes out of a Calvert County public school theater scene that has been a statewide standout. In 2023, Calvert County Public Schools won the state championship at the Maryland Thespian Festival, collecting a record number of awards across its high schools.
Slippery Rock, a public university in Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, enrolls more than 8,000 students and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate programs, according to the university. Its theatre department stages a musical and several plays each school year, giving acting majors repeated time in front of audiences before graduation.
For Calvert students weighing whether a theater degree is a realistic path, Johns’ progression from a black-box ensemble to a featured musical role in two years is a concrete example of how college programs build performers: smaller parts first, then larger ones on bigger stages as students advance.
The university’s release did not list Johns’ other credits or his plans after graduation. He is expected to finish his degree in 2028 if he stays on a four-year track.
