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

CHAPTER FIVE

The Girl Who Asked and the Boy Who Could Sing

This summer could have been made into an after-school movie.

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. This was not what I had in mind for summer.

But one morning, a new option 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. Nineteen, maybe. She had long straight hair and beautiful features and the particular energy of someone who has found the thing they are meant to do and cannot stop moving toward 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 and casting her show by eye, the way a director does.

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. I said something noncommittal. She was persistent. She knew about the dyslexia, and she said, with a certainty I did not share, that she would help. That it would be fine. That she had enough belief in me for both of us until mine caught up.

Something in a nine-year-old boy who had spent the better part of a year being catalogued by his deficits said yes.

I have thought about that yes many times since. I believe in guardian angels — not as a metaphor, but as something real and operational in a life. I believe she was placed in my path at that choice board at the exact moment I needed her to be there. I was a broken child by that summer. The diagnosis had named what was wrong without offering what was next. The resource classroom had made the wrong legible without making the right any more accessible. I needed someone who saw a von Trapp boy when they looked at me, not a learning profile. She did. And that changed everything that came after.

What if I had said no? I have sat with that question. I think I know the answer, and I don't like it.

 

The Summer Family

There were seven of us in the core cast. The YMCA in Tucson in the late 1970s had a particular cultural atmosphere — multicultural, inclusive, shaped by the peace-and-love ethos of the decade, with a genuine investment in belonging that wasn't a policy but a feeling. Our group reflected that. No tension. No bullying. No hierarchy of who was cooler or more capable. We were a company, and she ran us like one.

The YMCA had a full theater stage — real wings, real lighting, an audience space that could hold a genuine crowd. For a nine-year-old boy, having access to an actual theater to explore was something close to magic. We learned the space the way children learn any territory they are given freedom in: thoroughly, with our whole bodies. We investigated the costume room. We examined the lighting rigs. We understood, gradually, that this was our place for the summer, and that made it sacred in the particular way that summer places are sacred to children — temporary but total.

When we weren't on stage we were in the park next to the YMCA, practicing blocking on the grass, running lines in the open air, painting backdrops on the ground with brushes that were never quite the right size for what we were trying to do. The props were rudimentary. The set pieces were hand-built and hand-painted. None of it looked like Broadway. All of it felt like ours.

She made sure of that. She ran rehearsals the way the best teachers run classrooms — by making the work feel like play without making it less serious. Every correct blocking move was celebrated. Every moment of genuine harmony — six or seven voices finding the same note at the same time — was marked as a win, loudly and specifically. She modeled everything. When she wanted us to hit a note, she sang it. When she wanted us to feel a scene, she showed us what feeling it looked like. She never raised her voice. She never showed frustration. In two months of daily rehearsal with a group of children who were volunteers, not actors, I never once saw her lose the thread of her patience.

She was nineteen years old. I have known experienced teachers who could not do what she did. Leadership is sometimes not a matter of age or credential. It is a matter of genuine care made visible through consistent action, and she had it completely.

She could read my emotional spread — whether I was coping, masking, or actually engaged. And she always moved toward the engaged version of me, as though the other versions were just weather passing through.

I had a crush on her, because I was nine and she was beautiful and kind and believed in me. I want to say that plainly because it is true and because it mattered — not romantically, but motivationally. When someone you admire expects something of you, the wanting to meet that expectation is a genuine force. It moved me through things that would otherwise have been too hard to attempt.

 

Two Months at Frustration Level

The script was not a basal reader. Nobody had leveled it. Nobody had simplified the vocabulary or controlled the sentence length or removed the words a child with a second-grade reading level might struggle with. It was The Sound of Music — the full text, the actual lyrics, the stage directions as written. Every page was what reading teachers call frustration-level text: material that exceeds a student's independent reading ability and requires support to access.

I was at frustration level for two months straight. Nobody apologized for this. Nobody offered me an easier version. The show was the show, and I was in it.

The rehearsal rhythm was relentless in the best possible way. We heard the songs played, then sung by her, then sung by us, then sung again, then again. We ran the scenes, missed the cues, ran them again. We stood in the wrong places and were redirected. We forgot lines and were given them and forgot them again and were given them again. The loop of hear it, say it, do it, repeat it was not designed as a reading intervention. It was designed to put on a show. But for a child whose brain needed exactly that kind of multi-sensory, high-repetition, emotionally charged exposure to language in order to begin building the connections that reading requires — it was the most effective instruction I had ever received.

I developed a technique out of necessity. During rehearsals, while other cast members were running their scenes, I would hold the script and follow along with my finger — not reading, exactly, but trying to synchronize the words I was hearing with the marks on the page. Trying to catch the moment when the sound and the symbol were the same thing at the same time.

It was hard. It required a quality of attention that was almost painful. I lost the thread constantly and had to find it again. But there were moments — small, physical, unmistakable — when it worked. When the word coming out of someone's mouth and the word under my finger were the same word, and I knew it.

The –ING endings were the first anchor. Ringing. Singing. Bringing. The pattern was consistent, reliable, visually distinctive. Once I had it, I could find it anywhere on the page — not by sounding it out in the deliberate way I had been taught, but by recognizing it the way you recognize a face. It was the first written pattern I owned. And one anchor, I discovered, changes everything. One thing you can hold onto in the water is the difference between drowning and not drowning.

 

◆  THE SCIENCE: WHY MUSIC AND REAL STAKES REWIRE THE READING BRAIN

The Neuroscience of Song and Language

The brain networks that process rhythm and pitch are anatomically adjacent to — and functionally interactive with — the networks that parse the sound structure of language. Phonological awareness, the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words, is the single strongest predictor of reading success and the primary site of difficulty in dyslexia. Music training and musical engagement have been shown repeatedly to strengthen phonological processing — not as a side effect, but as a direct neurological consequence of working the adjacent networks.

This is why song lyrics are a uniquely effective on-ramp for struggling readers. The melody carries the rhythm of the words. The rhyme scheme makes the ending sounds predictable and therefore more perceptible. The repetition embeds the phonological pattern at a depth that a single reading of a sentence cannot achieve. Do-Re-Mi is not just a catchy song about musical scales. It is a phonemic awareness exercise set to music, and it works on a child's brain whether or not anyone in the room knows that's what it is.

Orthographic Mapping and the Finger

The technique I developed by instinct — tracking text with my finger while hearing the words spoken — is a close cousin of what reading scientists call orthographic mapping: the process by which the brain permanently bonds the visual appearance of a word to its spoken sound and its meaning. 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, connecting the two simultaneously, across enough repetitions that the bond becomes automatic.

I was not receiving a structured literacy intervention. I was following a script during a rehearsal for a children's musical. The cognitive work was the same.

Motivation as Neurological Condition

Self-determination theory identifies three conditions that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Our production had all three. I had chosen to participate. Every rehearsal provided visible evidence of growing competence — a song more secure, a cue caught, a harmony that landed. And I was deeply connected — to the director, to the cast, to the audience we were building toward.

Worksheets have none of these. A worksheet is relational to no one, provides evidence of competence only to children who already have the skill, and is chosen by no child who has been given a real alternative. The brain that is motivated is a brain that is chemically primed to learn. The brain that is not motivated is a brain that is enduring, not engaging. Endurance produces compliance. Engagement produces change.

 

 

Brown Paper Packages

The first song I truly knew was My Favorite Things. Brown paper packages tied up with string. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. The words came in pairs that rhymed and scanned, that had a logic you could feel before you could explain it. I learned it the way you learn a song — not word by word but phrase by phrase, the melody carrying the words the way a river carries a boat.

Then came So Long Farewell, with its blocking and its staggered exits, each child peeling off up the staircase one by one. That one required coordination — feet and voice and position all at once — and there was something in the demand of that coordination that focused me in a way that a page alone never had. You could not go somewhere else in your mind during So Long Farewell. The show required your whole attention or it showed.

Do-Re-Mi was the hardest. The phonemic conceit of it — each syllable of the scale attached to a word — was precisely the kind of thing my brain found slippery. I worked it longer than the others. I did not love it the way I loved the others. But I got it. And getting it taught me something important: that the things that are hardest to learn are sometimes the things that teach you the most about how you learn.

Edelweiss I loved from the first time I heard her sing it. There is something in that song — the simplicity of the melody, the gentleness of the lyric, the way it feels like a lullaby for something larger than a child — that went straight in and stayed. I sang it with my class every morning for twenty-four years. It was the first thing we did each day, a way of saying: we are together, we are safe, we are ready. I never told them where it came from. But it came from her, from that stage, from a summer that saved me without announcing that it was saving me.

Nobody diagnosed me with a song. But a song is what finally got past the diagnosis.

 

The Performance

We performed once, at the end of summer, for the other children and staff at the YMCA. Not a paying audience. Not a night when most parents could get off work to attend. For the camp — 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 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, but inhabited.

And something else had happened, something I did not have words for then and have spent years since trying to describe accurately. During the performance, in the moments between my cues when I was watching the others, I found myself following the script not with my finger but with my eyes. Not performing the tracking. Actually tracking. The words on the page and the words in the air matching in a way that felt different from the labored effort of rehearsal — faster, more automatic, less like work.

I did not know what to call this. I know now that what had happened was the beginning of orthographic mapping at scale — that two months of multi-sensory, emotionally charged, highly repetitive exposure to the same language had begun to do what structured literacy instruction is designed to do: permanently bond the written word to its sound in a brain that had resisted that bonding for years.

I felt proud standing on that stage. Not the complicated, defensive pride of a child who has talked his way out of a failing grade. Straightforward pride. I had done something that had seemed impossible in June, and it was August, and I had done it. With six other kids and a nineteen-year-old who never raised her voice. With hand-painted backdrops and a park next to the YMCA and a costume that fit because I had the right color hair.

I have wondered, sometimes, what became of her. Whether she went on to a career in theater, whether she is teaching somewhere, whether she knows what she did. I suspect she doesn't. I suspect she thinks of that summer, if she thinks of it at all, as a small project she ran at a day camp between her junior and senior years of college. She would be wrong. It was not small. It was the hinge on which my entire relationship with language turned.

 

Salzburg, Forty Years Later

When I was living in Sweden, I took a trip to Vienna and then to Salzburg. I had signed up, 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 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. Every word of every song. I knew them in the way you know something that was put into you before your critical faculty was fully formed — not memorized, exactly, but structural. Part of the architecture.

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, directed by a theater major whose name I cannot remember but whose face I can still see clearly.

There was a pause on the bus. Then several people wanted to know the whole story.

I told them about the choice board and the pretty counselor and the seven of us in the core cast and the park where we practiced blocking and the backdrops we painted on the ground. I told them about My Favorite Things and Do-Re-Mi and the way Edelweiss settled in 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.

I did not tell them it had saved me.

But it had. And I think my guardian angels knew it would, even before I walked through that door and saw her at the choice board, looking for a boy with blonde hair who didn't know yet that he was about to become Kurt von Trapp.

 

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.