James Van Der Beek honed his acting career in CT with a pivotal role in Goodspeed musical

Cheshire native James Van Der Beek, a beloved actor who died on Wednesday at 48 years old from colorectal cancer, had his first acting successes as a teenager while he was attending Cheshire Academy.

Van Der Beek was 17 years old when he played Henry Anderson in a 1994 revival of the musical “Shenandoah” at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam.

His professional acting career had already started to rise by the time he got the Goodspeed opportunity. In 1993, he appeared in the “Alter Ego” episode in the fifth season of the Nickelodeon series “Clarissa Explains It All.” Around this same time, he was fending off a bully in commercial for the acne medication Oxy-10 by exclaiming “Get your zits off my arm, man!”

Just months before his Goodspeed appearance, Van Der Beek had a different theater break. He played Fergus in the first New York production of the Edward Albee one-act “Finding the Sun,” which was on a bill with two other Albee plays at the Signature Theatre Company. That show only ran for a month. “Shenandoah” ran for nearly three months at the Goodspeed, from early July through September.

Outside of school and community theater shows, which included “The Fantasticks,” “Godspell,” “Grease” and “The Wizard of Oz,” “Shenandoah” was Van Der Beek’s first musical. His character Henry was featured in two big numbers in the show, “Next to Lovin’ (I Like Fightin’) and “It’s a Boy” and also sang and danced in several full-cast routines.

The revival was a big deal, since “Shenandoah” had its world premiere at the Goodspeed in 1974 and was one of the first shows that went on from Goodspeed to have major success on Broadway. The revival marked the show’s 20th anniversary. Besides Van Der Beek, it featured other young actors who would become well known in years to come, including Marc Kudisch (who has appeared in nearly 20 Broadway musicals, from “Assassins” to “Finding Neverland” to “Floyd Collins”) and Michael Park (also a Broadway regular, who had a long run on the TV soap “As the World Turns”).

Several local newspapers did feature stories about Van Der Beek when he was in “Shenandoah.” The Meriden Record-Journal put him on the front of the “Teen” section of the paper and quoted him calling the theater “Camp Goodspeed” because he found the experience so enjoyable.

Marlene Clark’s July 4, 1994 “Here ‘N There” column in the Courant mentioned Van Der Beek’s work in the show, noting that “he’s onstage all of the time but has only four lines.” Clark quotes the teen wishing he could play villains but lamenting that “you don’t see too many blond-haired bad guys.” In another Courant story by Gary Libow that ran a few weeks earlier, Van Der Beek explained that the first time he ever acted was when he was in the fifth grade in Cheshire, playing one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in a school play.

All the coverage about him mentioned his studies at Cheshire Academy, which he attended on a special scholarship for Cheshire residents. Van Der Beek was president of his Junior class and a member of the National Honors Society.

In a 1998 Courant story by TV columnist James Endrst, when “Dawson’s Creek” had just debuted, Van Der Beek explained that the Massachusetts town in the series reminded him of his own childhood in Cheshire. “I come from a safe, happy, loving home,” he told Endrst, to which the journalist added “though he worries his family — who still live there — may have to change its phone number.”

“Dawson’s Creek” became a signature hit for the fledgling network The WB and led to a long and varied career for Van Der Beek. Though he rarely returned to the live stage, he amassed dozens of TV and movie credits that kept him active right up to his cancer diagnosis last year. In recent years, Van Der Beek appeared in the movie “Jay & Silent Bob Reboot” and the TV movie series “Overcompensating” and voiced Boris in 69 episodes of the cartoon series “Vampirina.”

Goodspeed Musicals artistic director Donna Lynn Hilton, who was working at the theater in another capacity when “Shenandoah” was there in 1994, said “We remember James as a talented, shy, hard-working high school student, long before he went on to fame on ‘Dawson’s Creek.’ We are holding his beautiful young family in our hearts as they mourn his passing. May his memory be a blessing.”

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