After a long and academically draining semester, many students might allow themselves to take a much-needed break, spending their summers relaxing before they return to the classroom in the fall. The 18 students in the cast and crew of NYU’s Presidential Welcome Reality Show, however, chose to spend the last three months in the rehearsal room building a musical from the ground up.
The Presidential Welcome Reality Show is a biannual musical sketch written and performed by upperclassmen students at Radio City Music Hall designed to introduce new students to the university and spotlight NYU’s mental health services.
“This was a very life-changing summer because I learned so much from everyone in the room,” cast member and Tisch sophomore Eimy Moncion said. “Everyone brought in something so special — not just in terms of talent or writing, but as a person.”
Auditions for the show began back in the spring, where students sang one minute of a song of their choosing. Then, some students were chosen for group callback sessions where they focused on quickly learning choreography and writing under time constraints. From there, a select few students were asked to write and record their own monologue and a song — one comedic and one dramatic.
After the intense process, cast members were notified if they had been selected in late March. Cast members and Tisch juniors Hayes Sagalyn and Elijah Dor, who chose to audition together, were on a spring break trip in Los Angeles when they received their acceptance emails.
“We screamed for probably five minutes, consecutively,” Sagalyn said. “I felt like I was in a Disney movie. I’ve never screamed like that.”
After the excitement of being cast, the real work began. From early June until the opening performance on Aug. 26, the cast and crew spent three hours every weekday in rehearsals, where they created the entire show from scratch. Director and Steinhardt alum Matthew Dean Marsh often tasked the cast to write songs or monologues based on specific themes, like a New York anthem or a sketch about loneliness. Students would develop these pieces outside of rehearsal and then present them to the group.
“I definitely grew as a writer, and I think we all as a cast collectively grew as writers, just because we’re doing it every day,” Tisch senior and returning cast member Maimuna Suwaneh said.
After morning rehearsals, cast and crew members returned to Rubin Hall — where many of them lived over the summer — to continue writing collaboratively.
“The community was so special,” Moncion said. “We all did get along very well together. We loved working with each other, and we wrote with each other all the time.”
Over the course of three months, the group grew even closer. Beyond the hours rehearsing and writing together, they hung out constantly. They hosted a murder mystery night, a drag night, a picnic in Central Park with the NYU Abu Dhabi and Shanghai Reality Show casts and even a seven-hour puzzle marathon in the Rubin Hall lounge.
While the experience bonded the cast deeply, their work also resonated with incoming students. Since the show, many cast members have been stopped on the street by first-year students, who have shared how effective the performances were at easing worries about starting college.
“So many people have been coming up to the cast and saying that, you know, they’re thinking about college differently,” assistant music director and Steinhardt junior Luca Millard-Kish said. “It was really just hitting the mark.”
For these students, this summer wasn’t just about building their resume or performing in one of New York City’s most iconic venues — it was a time of creative growth, personal development and lasting connection.
“I’m proud of how much I’ve grown as a writer, how much I’ve grown as a performer, how much I’ve grown as a person,” cast member and Liberal Studies sophomore Tarun Yanamandra said. “Really, I’m just proud to have been a part of it.”
Contact Skylar Boilard at [email protected].
