Emerson Mae Chan
By Jen Banowetz
January 2025 View more Spotlight
Naperville actor is learning the biz in Les Miz
Dressed in rags, her face artistically smudged, and a mic discreetly taped to her forehead, 9-year-old Emerson Mae Chan is ready for work. Cue “Castle on a Cloud.”
The Naperville fourth grader is playing both Little Cosette and Young Éponine in the national Broadway tour of Les Misérables, which is stopping in Chicago through Jan. 5 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre.
Since child acting roles are double-cast, Chan shares both roles with another young actor, alternating between playing Little Cosette four times a week and Young Éponine four times a week.
After two weeks of rehearsals on the road, Chan (who goes by Emmy) made her debut Oct. 1 in Louisville. But she was already a veteran: She’d just spent a year playing Natalie Hillard in the national tour (31 cities!) of Mrs. Doubtfire. Her parents, Lindsay and Brandon Chan, tag-team traveling with Emmy, sometimes with little bro Eli, 6, along for the ride. You could say her career has “snowballed” as mom Lindsay describes it. First is was a little ballet at age 3, then singing and acting with Naperville’s Road Show Inc., followed by Paramount Theatre’s 2022 production of The Sound of Music (as Gretl’s understudy), which led to Mrs. Doubtfire and now Les Miz. Included in the journey were signing with an agent and going to auditions. “It’s definitely kind of like an iceberg; you don’t see below the surface everything else that’s happening to make that one [role] happen,” Lindsay explains. “It’s a fun adventure, though, and there’s so much that both of our kids are learning—so much more independence and so much more resilience and all these different life skills that are important to us to raise good humans…so we’ve been very thankful to give them much more world experience in the last 15 months that we’ve been doing this.”
We had a chance to chat with Emmy as she headed home before her run in Chicago.
Q: What do you love about being onstage?
A: I really like making people laugh and I like making them happy and I like performing. Being onstage makes me feel like I can do anything and singing makes me very happy!
Q: Are there other roles or shows you’d like to do someday?
A: I would at some point want to be young Nala from The Lion King or I would want to be—when I’m older—Juliet from & Juliet.
Q: What’s school like when you’re touring?
A: I have a teacher that travels with us, and she’s also our backstage wrangler so she takes care of us backstage [during performances].
Q: What have you learned so far in show biz?
A: I’ve learned quite a few things but definitely to be more flexible. On tour our schedules and school hours can be crazy. I have become more independent too. I also learned that auditioning for things can be a lot of work, but it feels so amazing when the hard work pays off.
Q: How’s the traveling?
A: I really like all the cities we went to. It’s fun going to new places, but it’s a little hard sometimes because you’re in a hotel room for one or two weeks and then you have to pack your whole life up and bring it to another place.
Q: What tips do you have for kids who want to be performers?
A: My advice would probably be keep going and never give up—if you don’t succeed at first keep trying because when the time is right, it’ll come and something will happen. It depends if it’s right—sometimes you just got to wait. Just keep trying.
Photos: Jessica Balun (Little Cosette); Joan Marcus (Mrs. Doubtfire)
