Beau takes centre stage

Beau Woodbridge (OH 2020) was only seven or eight years old when he started singing lessons and taking classes in musical theatre. He soon took his first steps on stage, too, at his local performing arts school.

“I played a very enthusiastic starfish in some numbers from The Little Mermaid!” says Beau.

He has come a very long way since that first on-stage experience and Beau was recently revealed as the lead in the Australian premiere of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen.

The achievement is the result of years of hard work, with Beau routinely performing and touring Australia and New Zealand, and later working in the UK after graduating from Haileybury in 2020.

Dear Evan Hansen is the powerful coming-of-age story of a socially anxious high school student who finds himself in the spotlight when he inadvertently creates a role for himself at the centre of a local tragedy. It has won six Tony Awards. Beau will play the shy and timid highschooler who is ashamed of his social anxiety.

Beau received a call at three o’clock in the morning telling him he had won the lead role.

“I’d been studying in London at the time and was completing my MA in Musical Theatre at the Royal Academy of Music. I answered the phone and my team here in Australia gave me the good news. Even though I had a long day of work ahead of me, I didn’t get any more sleep that night,” says Beau.

The opening night will be in Sydney in October and rehearsals begin in September.

“It’s a very vocally demanding show, so at the moment I am just building up my stamina and singing the show’s material six days a week. I want to become very familiar with it so I can play with that material when I’m in the rehearsal room with the very talented and creative cast,” says Beau.

While his focus is now firmly set on opening night in Sydney and on bringing Evan Hansen to life, Beau also has strong and fond memories of his performing arts experiences at Haileybury.

“I played Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at Castlefield, and Emmett Forest in Legally Blonde during Year 11 at Keysborough,” he says.

“However, a standout for me is probably a production that unfortunately never saw the light of day due to COVID-19. It was a parody play of Harry Potter called Puffs and while we were looking forward to putting that on, everyone had a great time during the rehearsal period.”

The Performing Arts program at Haileybury is recognised as being one of the best available in schools across the country, and the school’s stage productions are renowned for their grand scale and professionalism.

The comprehensive range of performing arts experiences on offer for students is broad and there is something to inspire young people whatever their passion — whether on stage, working behind the scenes, making music in an ensemble, or taking on a technical lighting or sound role in stage production.

Whatever creative pathway a student chooses, who knows what it might lead to? Just ask Beau.