Cochrane High will stage "The Hello Girls," a true story of five women who fought for recognition in the U.S. Army during the First World War, to a limited audience Nov. 24-27.
The musical was originally set to stage around Remembrance Day last year, before COVID-19 forced them to cancel, explained Cochrane High performance and visual arts theatre director Dustin Whetton.
He added the musical was chosen to support the school's efforts to acknowledge the contributions of lesser-known female, Indigenous, Black, Asian and other minority soldiers who fought in the wars but often do not receive equal recognition.
"We really push this idea of equity and diversity in the school - acknowledging that we are a diverse population with different cultures," he said. "One thing we've been trying to do on Remembrance Day is demonstrate the diversity of those who fought and served in the war for us."
The musical follows the lives of five of America's first women soldiers serving on the front line as bilingual telephone operators. Helen Hill, Grace Banker, Bertha Hunt, Suzanne Prevot and Louise LeBreton are played by Denai Eerkes in Grade 11, Maddie Waterhouse in Grade 10 and Grade 12 students Aurelia Souvairan, Sydnie Alcock and Keelyn Thorogood.
"This is sort of another one of those stories," Whetton explained. "We're talking about women who have served for us and the impact they left on the war and society and how that later led to women's right to vote and all these other things. It was one of the reasons we chose it - the idea that we want to share more and more stories of the lesser heard within the world of Remembrance Day and the wars."
Peter Mills and Cara Reichel's original musical "The Hello Girls," chronicles the lives of the women after the First World War and their decades-long battle for equality and recognition upon their return home.
"Louise LeBreton, who is the youngest of the five women, eventually wrote a newspaper article where she talked about the journey and everything that happened that sort of got the spark going again - digging into what actually happened while they were there and what they did," said Whetton.
In 1917, General Pershing, the leader of the American expeditionary forces, realized that they needed a state-of-the-art telephone system to help fight the war across fronts that spanned hundreds of miles. Neither the male signal corps nor the French telephone operators were fast enough for the job, so a call went out to recruit new operators out of the U.S. Over 7,000 of the applications came from women.
Banker, who was a chief operator at Bell Telephone, was selected to lead the first unit of 33 women. The women were divided into three sections and Banker's group was assigned to General Pershing's headquarters.
The female operators were more efficient at the work than their male counterparts, who were credited with running the so-called "fighting lines" and were closer to the battles.
Banker's team was selected to serve when more help was needed on the front lines in the battle of Saint-Mihiel. Her team ran the fighting lines during the Meuse-Argonne offensive which turned the tide and ultimately led to the end of the First World War.
Upon their return home, the women were informed that they were not eligible for veteran benefits. They were instead categorized as civilian contractors by the veteran's administration.
A group of them continued to fight the U.S government for equal rights in a legal battle that lasted 60 years. In 1977, the Hello Girls were granted veterans' status by the U.S. Congress. Only 33 of the 223 women that served overseas survived to receive their honourable discharge papers, including LeBreton.
Grade 12 student Beck Phillips, who plays multiple parts in the musical, including the role of Private Matterson - a new recruit to the military and the love interest of Prevot - said that the production invokes the viewer to reflect on the lives of real people, who made real sacrifices.
"I find adding a personal interest in some people who were real, and actually served and getting to see what it's like from an arts perspective is really important for everybody," he said. "These kids are embodying real people that actually did these things."
Despite the production looking a little different, with masks and some distancing while singing, Phillips said he values being able to perform in his last year of high school having many of those opportunities taken away by the pandemic.
"I'm very excited to be doing dress rehearsals right now. I found last year we got our fix by remembering that we're coming back and that's kind of how we got through it. We have everybody, we have the teachers, so we could stand to wait - and here we are."
Due to health and capacity restrictions, the musical will show only to limited invitees of the cast and crew and is not open to the general public.
The Cochrane High theatre program's next production will be an adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" set in a dystopian world, which will show sometime in the second semester.
