Brendan O’Leary ’10 debuts his first musical as the spring mainstage production
By Buff Lindau
Photo by Andy Duback

I’d never seen anything done using a kids’ TV show,” said Brendan O’Leary ’10, author of Professor Wellright’s Library, a new musical that was chosen for performance in McCarthy this spring, the first time in college memory that the Mainstage spring theater production was student-written.

O’Leary teamed with jazz musician Zachary Cooper, a student at UVM, to create the show, and their play within a play (or rather adult musical inside a children’s TV show), was performed in early April.

“We wanted to support a student-initiated production as much as possible, having seen how much students learned by producing Sondheim’s Into the Woods themselves in 2005,” said Peter
Harrigan ’83, director of the show, costumer designer, and associate professor of theater. Harrigan and his theater department colleagues Cathy Hurst and John Devlin reviewed O’Leary’s play along with others and chose his musical. They all worked collaboratively to bring it to fruition, while it is clearly a creation of Brendan O’Leary’s imagination, and the musical talents of Zach Cooper.

“An early draft showed me Brendan had a wonderful wit and a real sense of heart—which would be appealing in any play,” Harrigan said.

In May 2007, the idea struck O’Leary to do a parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, but with the twist of a bad or a comical Mr. Rogers. He spent the summer writing, while interning on the tech crew at the professional Saint Michael’s Playhouse. He eventually wrote the script so many times that he had material to fill four shows. He workshopped the script with the Drama Club in spring 2008, got input from faculty and students, figured out what was good, which characters could be eliminated, and honed the script into Professor Wellright’s Library: A New Musical.

“I wanted to be someone who would create something that hadn’t been done before,” said O’Leary, who is a Margaret McCarthy Fine Arts scholar. He gets inspiration from the tension between what’s on and what’s off camera of the kids’ TV show. “Life presents things that are not camera-appropriate” for kids, O’Leary said. In fact, one of his themes is that “life’s not camera-appropriate.”

Harrigan said, “It’s not often you get to start from scratch with a show; it’s a great honor to be able to help shape this work.”