Submitted photo Finn O'Hara, 15, of Hubbard is shown under the marquee for The Town Hall in New York, the theater where he will appear in a special performance of "The Last Boy" or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

HUBBARD — Finn O’Hara made his first trip to New York City right before the COVID-19 pandemic started and sat in the audience for a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice.”

When he returned a little more than a year later, Finn was on one of those New York stages, and people were paying to watch him.

Last summer the 15-year-old Hubbard High School freshman was cast in “The Last Boy,” a play with music that is based on the true story of the boys housed in Dorm Number One at Terezin concentration camp in the Czech Republic during World War II. The boys created an underground publication called Vedem magazine that was filled with stories, poems and songs they wrote while being held captive.

Sidney Taussig, one of the few survivors from the concentration camp, had buried the manuscripts, which survived the war and are included in the play.

The show ran for two weeks last summer Off-Broadway at the Theatre at St. Clement, and Finn will return next month for a benefit performance at The Town Hall in the Broadway theater district on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“The Last Boy” is the most recent step in an acting journey that started when Finn was 3 years old, and his grandmother saw something in the newspaper about one of Easy Street Productions’ acting classes.

“She was watching him in the summertime and needed something to do with him to get all of that energy out,” Finn’s mother, Heather O’Hara, said.

Two years later, he played a puppy in “101 Dalmatians.”

“When he came off stage, it was like Disneyworld, just the best thing that’s ever happened to him,” she said.

Finn said doing the musical “Newsies” for Kent State University Theatre’s summer stock production at Porthouse Theater in Cuyahoga Falls in 2017 is when he started to think of theater as something to pursue seriously.

“There’s something about that show and the amazing theater program, it brought me into a more professional setting,” he said. “It showed me a new face to it.”

With limited roles for children available locally, Finn began traveling outside the area for work. His first professional job was playing the lead in a production of “A Christmas Story” in Indiana.

“We just saw an ad in Backstage (a theater magazine and website) and thought it would be a cool experience,” he said.

Backstage also is where he learned about “The Last Boy.” The show was cast during the pandemic, so auditions took place online.

Early in the rehearsal process, Finn and the other young actors heard the stories of what the boys endured at Terezin and also got to talk to Taussig via Zoom.

“Reading a book, you can’t really imagine it,” Finn said. “Hearing every detail from someone who was there, you really got a feel for it.”

Hearing from Taussig also helped Finn figure out how to play his character, who he described as comic relief in the story. It was a hard role to grasp in a Holocaust story.

“Sidney said they would always try to find the lighter moments,” he said. “He never remembers them crying except for when they were hungry.”

Adding to the challenge is the initial script was far too long, so each day the actors would have to learn new pages and forget the parts that had been excised from the script.

All of this was going on while the pandemic still had much of New York still shut down. “The Last Boy” opened in that window where COVID-19 cases started to decline and before the delta variant triggered a new resurgence.

Theater isn’t Finn’s only interest. He plays French horn, trumpet, mellophone and violin, and he said he’s like most teenagers in that he enjoys playing video games and hanging out with friends. But he also hopes to keep pursuing a career in the theater.

There is talk of a regional production or a short tour of “The Last Boy” on the East Coast in 2022-23 with the hopes of raising the money necessary to mount a full-scale Broadway production. But Finn said he essentially has to re-audition with each new production of “The Last Boy.” If its trip to Broadway takes too long, he could age out of the show, which some of the original cast members already have.

He said he’s keeping his schedule open for “The Last Boy” while pursuing other options, such as the commercial he filmed while in New York for Robin, which creates programs to help children with their mental health and well-being.

“I’m always trying to keep busy,” Finn said.

As for a long-term goal: “Maybe going to a college for the performing arts and making this my job. That would be the dream.”

To suggest a Saturday profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com or metro editor Marly Reichert at mreichert@tribtoday.com.

agray@tribtoday.com