Composer | Director | Designers

Composer—Ric Averill
“My impressions of opera when I was growing up,” said librettist, Ric Averill, “was of Warner Brothers cartoons with Bugs Bunny making fun of opera.  When I grew up I discovered that I could write a real opera and have it still be just as fun as a cartoon!”

Ric Averill has been the Artistic Director and principal playwright for the Seem-To-Be Players professional children’s theatre company since he and his wife, Jeanne, founded the company in 1973.

He writes both plays and music, with a B.F.A. in Music Composition and an M.A. in Children’s Theatre, both from the University of Kansas.  Ric is a Kansas Playwrighting Fellow, and he and his company are recipients of the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award and numerous touring and operational grants from the Kansas Arts Commission, Heartland Arts Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Hallmark Cards. 

Ric’s plays are published by DramaticPublishing, and he has contributed a chapter on playwrighting for Basic Drama Projects, a national high school textbook by Dr. Fran Tanner.

Ric has had two plays selected for the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices play development symposium two selected for the IUPUI/Boderman Youth Theater playwright symposium in Indianapolis, and has also attended both events as an actor and a director.  He is also a three time winner of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education’s Unpublished Play Reading Project.

Included among Ric’s many commissions are the Kennedy Center’s Alice in Wonderland, First Stage Milwaukee’s Little Drummer Boy, and a yet-to-be-named script for the Nashville’s Children’s Theatre.

Ric also writes screenplays, directs, teaches, acts, plays banjo, mandolin, fiddle, loves his two grown kids and talks like a duck.