Dyslexia Challenges: Musical Theater as a Transformative Tool

CHAPTER FIVE

The Girl Who Asked and the Boy Who Could Sing

This chapter details how a young Sean used to overcome literacy challenges during a summer production. By engaging in constant auditory repetition and memorizing songs from The Sound of Music, he transitioned from masking his inability to read to successfully decoding the written script. The narrative highlights how the rhythmic nature of rehearsals served as a bridge, allowing him to internalize language through hearing rather than traditional sight-reading. This immersive experience fostered a sense of personal pride and transformed a stressful task into an enjoyable, soul-saving activity. Ultimately, the texts illustrate the power of performance arts in helping students adapt to and conquer learning obstacles through unconventional methods. 

 

LONG-FORM PODCAST 

The Sound of Learning to Read SLIDE DECK

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, I had just been diagnosed with dyslexia. I did not yet know what to do with that information, except to carry it quietly and hope nobody asked. The YMCA day camp in downtown Tucson was what summer looked like for my brother and me — two working parents, a choice board every morning, and the daily competition of getting there early enough to claim the activity you actually wanted.

 

The Choice Board

The system was simple. Arrive early, get your choice. Arrive late, get what was left. My brother and I were not always early. There were mornings when the good choices — sports, swimming, anything involving motion and the outdoors — were gone by the time we got there, and we found ourselves in ballet. Learning dummy player. This was not what I had in mind for summer.

But one morning, something different appeared on the board. A summer production of The Sound of Music. A full staging — or close enough to one — organized by a camp counselor who was, I would later understand, a theater major using the summer to get her first experience running a production. She was young. She was pretty. She had the particular energy of someone who has found the thing they are meant to do and cannot stop talking about it.

She came over to me while I was looking at the choices. Not to the group — to me specifically. Blonde hair, hazel eyes, the approximate age and build of a von Trapp child. She had been watching the kids come in that morning and casting her show by eye.

She asked if I wanted to play Kurt.

My first reaction, underneath the surface reaction of being singled out by a pretty girl, was fear. The clean, specific fear of a child who cannot read being asked to learn a script. I knew what a play required. Lines memorized from a page. Blocking written in stage directions. Cues that had to be tracked in text. The entire apparatus of theater runs on the written word, and I had just spent fourth grade being measured against the written word and found significantly lacking.

I said something noncommittal. She was persistent.

She knew about the dyslexia — I don't know how it came up, or whether my parents had mentioned it to the camp, but she knew. And she said, with a matter-of-factness that I still think about, that she would help. That it would be fine. That she had more belief in me than I currently had in myself, and she was going to need me to borrow some of hers until mine caught up.

She did not say it in those words. But that was what she meant. And something in a nine-year-old boy who had spent the better part of a year being told, in the bureaucratic language of IEPs and resource classrooms, what he could not do — something in that boy said yes.

 

First Rehearsal

The YMCA had a full theater stage. It still does — the building has a long history as a small community theater, and the stage is real, with wings and lighting and an audience seating area that could hold a genuine crowd. Walking onto it for the first time had a particular quality I did not have words for then. The floor felt different. The air felt different. There was a sense of being in a space that was designed for something to happen.

The first rehearsals were almost entirely music. She played the songs, sang them herself, had us sing them back. This was not a relief exactly — it was still material to learn, still words I had to know — but it was a different kind of learning. The words arrived in melody. They arrived with rhythm and rhyme and the particular stickiness of a tune that attaches itself to your brain whether you want it to or not.

The first song I remember knowing was My Favorite Things. Brown paper packages tied up with string. Raindrops on roses. The words came in pairs that rhymed and scanned, that had a logic to them that was musical rather than phonetic, and that logic was one I could follow. Then came So Long Farewell — the children's goodbye song, playful and a little melancholy, the one with the blocking that required us to peel off one by one up the staircase. That one took more rehearsal. The staging and the singing had to happen simultaneously, and coordinating my feet and my mouth while tracking where I was supposed to be on stage was its own cognitive challenge.

Do-Re-Mi was the hardest. Doe, a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun. The song is built on a phonemic conceit — each syllable of the scale attached to a word — and for a child with phonological processing difficulties, that particular structure, which is easy and delightful for most children, required more work. I got there eventually. But that one took longer than it should have, and I noticed.

Edelweiss I loved from the first time I heard it. I have sung it with my class every morning for twenty-four years. Some songs just settle into you and stay.

The script arrived in pieces. Stage directions, dialogue, the architecture of who stood where and said what and when. She never pressured me to read it cold in front of the group. What she did instead was what good theater directors do instinctively — she read through scenes aloud, she demonstrated, she repeated. The text was always accompanied by sound and action. You didn't just read that you crossed to stage left. You watched someone cross to stage left, and then you crossed to stage left, and then you did it again.

This was, I would understand much later, a deeply literate environment that did not require literacy to enter.

 

The Tracking

Somewhere in the first few weeks I developed a technique. I had used a version of it before — the finger-tracking I had done with books at school, trying to maintain the fiction of reading while actually memorizing. But in rehearsal it became something different, something more precise.

I would hold the script and follow along with my finger while other cast members ran their lines. Not because I was reading, exactly — but because I was trying to synchronize the words I was hearing with the words on the page. To catch the moment when the sound and the symbol aligned. It required a quality of attention that was almost painful at first, the effort of holding two channels open simultaneously — the auditory and the visual — and looking for the match between them.

And then, gradually, it started to work.

Not perfectly. Not consistently. Not in the way that a fluent reader tracks text, where the eye leads and the sound follows automatically. It was slower than that, and more effortful, and there were passages where I lost the thread and had to find it again. But there were also moments — specific, physical, unmistakable moments — when the word I was hearing and the word my finger was touching were the same word, and I knew it, and something in my brain registered that connection.

I did not know what to call this. I did not know that what I was doing had a name in reading science — that the connection between the phoneme and the grapheme, between the sound and the symbol, is precisely the bridge that dyslexia disrupts and that structured literacy instruction is designed to rebuild. I knew only that it was working, slowly, and that the wanting was strong enough to keep me doing it.

The wanting mattered. I have thought about this for decades as a teacher. The Berenstain Bears, which I had memorized so completely that I could perform reading it without decoding a single word — I had no particular desire to crack the code of that text. There was nothing in it that I needed badly enough to push through the difficulty. But the script, with its blocking and its songs and its stage and its audience and its pretty director who believed I could do it — that I wanted. And the wanting changed what the difficulty cost.

 

◆  THE SCIENCE: WHY REAL STAKES BEAT WORKSHEETS

What happened that summer at the YMCA was not an accident, though it felt like one. It was, in the language of cognitive science, the accidental construction of a high-stakes, intrinsically motivating learning environment — and the research on what makes those environments work is both robust and almost entirely ignored by the systems designed to teach struggling readers.

Motivation and the Reading Brain

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three conditions that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy (some degree of choice), competence (the experience of genuine progress), and relatedness (a sense of connection to the people and purpose involved). The YMCA production had all three. I had chosen to participate. The songs were giving me visible, audible evidence of progress every week. And I was connected — to the director, to the other children, to an audience that would actually see us perform.

Worksheets have none of these. A worksheet is autonomous only in the sense that a child sits alone with it. It offers no experience of competence to a child who cannot yet decode — only a record of errors. And it is relational to no one. It exists in a vacuum of accountability where the only witness to the failure is the child and the red pen.

The Role of Emotion in Memory

Neuroscience has established clearly that emotional arousal — positive or negative — enhances memory consolidation. The amygdala, the brain's emotion-processing center, tags experiences as worth retaining based on their emotional significance. An experience that produces genuine feeling — pride, anticipation, the specific pleasure of a harmony landing right — is more likely to be retained than an experience that produces nothing at all.

This is why I can still sing every word of every song from that production fifty years later, and cannot tell you what was on the worksheets I completed in fourth grade. The songs were emotionally significant. The worksheets were not. The brain kept one and discarded the other, exactly as it was designed to do.

Finger Tracking and Orthographic Mapping

The technique I developed by instinct — tracking words with my finger while hearing them spoken — is a close cousin of what reading scientists call orthographic mapping: the process by which the brain permanently bonds the visual form of a word to its spoken sound. This bonding is what makes fluent reading possible. It is disrupted in dyslexia, but it is not destroyed. It can be rebuilt through repeated, multi-sensory exposure — seeing the word, hearing the word, and connecting the two simultaneously, exactly as I was doing in rehearsal.

I was not receiving an intervention. I was receiving a role in a musical. But the cognitive work was the same.

 

 

The Performance

We performed once, at the end of summer, for the other children and staff at the YMCA. Not for a paying audience, not on a night when parents could get off work to come. For the camp itself, the community we had spent the summer inside.

It was enough.

I stood on that stage and I knew my songs. I knew my blocking. I knew where to stand and when to move and what came next. The script was not in a tight grip — I did not need it in a tight grip anymore. I had heard the words enough times, tracked them enough times, sung them enough times, that they had become part of me in the way that deeply learned things become part of you: not stored, exactly, but inhabited.

I felt proud. Not the complicated, defensive pride of the child who has talked his way out of a failing grade. Straightforward, uncomplicated pride. I had done a thing that had seemed impossible in June, and it was August, and I had done it.

My brother had not been cast. He had spent the summer doing other things while I rehearsed, and I think that was the first time in my childhood that I had something he didn't — not a possession, but an experience. A capability. A self that had been built over those weeks of rehearsal that was slightly different from the self I had brought in.

I did not know, standing on that stage, that what had happened to me had a mechanism. That the months of hearing words while tracking them with my finger, of embedding language in melody and rhythm and physical movement, of wanting badly enough to push through the difficulty — that these were not magic, but science. That I had accidentally stumbled into the conditions that the research would later confirm were exactly what a child with dyslexia needed: high motivation, multi-sensory input, repetition without shame, and real stakes.

The stakes had been real. There was an audience. There was a director who believed in me. There was a stage, and a costume, and a song I had to know.

No worksheet has ever offered me any of that.

 

Salzburg, Forty Years Later

When I was living in Sweden, I took a trip to Vienna and then to Salzburg. I had signed up, somewhat on impulse, for the Sound of Music tour — the bus that takes you to the filming locations, the gazebo, the lake, the mountains. I boarded the bus and discovered I was the only man on it. This was mildly awkward.

Then the singing started.

The tour guide played the songs and the passengers sang along, and I knew every word of every song — knew them in the way you know something that was put into you before you were fully formed, before you had a critical faculty to evaluate whether this was the kind of thing a grown man should know by heart. I knew them the way I know my own name.

Someone asked how I knew them so well. I said I had played Kurt von Trapp as a child, in a production at the YMCA in Tucson, Arizona.

There was a pause. Then several people wanted to know everything about it.

I told them about the director whose name I cannot remember, the pretty theater major who saw a blonde-haired boy at a choice board and decided he was a von Trapp. I told them about My Favorite Things and Do-Re-Mi and the way Edelweiss settled into me and never left. I told them, though not in these words, that the summer she cast me was the summer I stopped being only a child who could not read and started being a child who could do something extraordinary with language — who could hold it in his body, perform it, give it back to an audience.

I did not tell them it had saved me. But it had.

 

I did not choose an intervention. An intervention chose me, wearing lederhosen.

Theater rehearsals helped bridge the gap with literacy primarily through repetition, auditory learning, and memorization.

The process of "constant listening, hearing, [and] saying" during rehearsals allowed the narrator to internalize the script. This was particularly effective because:

• Repetition and Song: Repeatedly performing songs like "Do-Re-Mi" and "So Long, Farewell" turned the learning process into something fun and engaging. By the end of the summer, the narrator had learned not only their own lines and songs but also those they weren't even a part of simply because they had heard them so often.
• Aural to Visual Connection: Having heard the lines so many times, the narrator reached a point where they could "figure out a lot of stuff that was on the page". The familiarity with the spoken word allowed them to begin decoding the written text, or at least "fake" reading because they already knew the content by heart.
• Masking and Adaptation: The narrator used their developed listening skills—a strategy they also employed in school to mask the fact that they couldn't read—to memorize the script in the same way they had memorized books like the Berenstain Bears.

Ultimately, this immersion in the script meant that by the final production, the narrator no longer needed to keep the script in a "tight little grip" and felt a sense of pride in knowing their parts.