New Musical Play WESLEY will Have Private Industry Readings in May

The creators of WESLEY, a new musical play written by Scott Steidl and Mark Hantoot (Executive Producer of the soon to be released feature film The Featherweight, produced by Leo DiCaprio’s Appian Way – Killers of the Flower Moon), inspired by Stacey O’Brien’s New York Times bestselling memoir Wesley The Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl, (in which a young musician and wildlife enthusiast trades in the world of Human relationships for a life spent with an injured Barn Owl) today announced two upcoming by-invitation developmental readings of the production, directed by Mary Duncan, with music by Scott Steidl. The private industry readings will be held on Wednesday, May 15th at 11:00am and 3:00pm in The Jerry Orbach Theatre at The Theater Center, 210 West 50th Street, 3rd floor. For inquiries or to secure a reservation on the guest list, please email: wesleythemusical@gmail.com. 

Based on a true story, WESLEY details the nineteen-year saga of a promising young pop/rock musician and would-be biologist, who adopts an injured Barn Owlet with no hope of surviving. Our protagonist, Casey, receives the newborn from her boss at the Caltech Owl Lab, where she works cleaning cages. Her instructions are to document the infant’s behavior until it passes away. Casey does so diligently, only to discover the Owl refuses to die. The two grow closer as days turn to years. In time, Casey abandons her music career, her bandmates, and her friends, to focus on her relationship with Wesley, carefully documenting everything he does. The two become inseparable, literally mates for life, supporting each other, even as Casey struggles through her own battle with brain cancer. It’s almost 20 years by the time Wesley passes, sending Casey into a spiral of despair and loss. She copes by writing a memoir of their time together, which is rejected by every publisher she contacts. It’s a profound negation of everything she’s ever loved. Casey’s at the lowest point of her life when her old boss at Caltech examines her years of journals and videos detailing Wesley’s life, and discovers Casey has learned more about Barn Owls than any scientist before her. She’s inadvertently become a true researcher in her own right, a celebrity in the Owl world, and a Caltech legend. All while enjoying a kind of unshakable love and devotion that few Humans ever experience - “The Way of the Owl.”

WESLEY has been developed over multiple workshops at the Opera Department of the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where the production’s director serves as Managing Artistic Director. The cast includes outstanding graduate students in Voice from Peabody. The upcoming New York workshop marks the first time the material has been seen outside of Peabody. 

Wesley the Owl received a starred review from Publishers’ Weekly, a 4 out of 4-star review from People Magazine, a recommendation from the Today Show, and many, many rave reviews in national and local magazines, newspapers, and blogs. Audubon Magazine named it as one of its Editorial Picks, and Orange County Magazine named it as Book of the Year. Also, it was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 5 weeks, coming in at number 11, and was an LA Times Bestseller. It was listed in the top 5 in San Diego (Union Tribune), Denver, and many other cities, hitting number one in San Diego. It has been a bestseller in Italy, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, and China, and has been published in many other languages as well (Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, German, Hungarian, Polish).