Internationally produced and published playwright and book author and respected director, teacher, and actor, Will Osborne s career in professional theatre spans four decades. His play Smoke & Mirrors, a comic murder mystery co-authored with Anthony Herrera, has been produced in theatres throughout the United States, as well as in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Seoul, Korea. In 2007, collaborating with Randy Courts, he provided book and lyrics for Magic Tree House; The Musical, a full-scale, Broadway-style family musical that traveled to 54 cities around the country and was later translated and produced throughout Germany. Will s writing for musical theatre also includes Saddle Jazz, a Western Swing musical (music and lyrics by Nick Plakias); The Wonderful O, an adaptation of the James Thurber novella (also with Randy Courts), produced at the West Bank Café in New York and the Leonard Bernstein Institute in Nashville; Manifest Dstiny, an NEA-funded extravaganza set in 1840s America; and A Night in New Orleans: A Louis Armstrong Musical (with Murray Horwitz and legendary New Orleans composer and performer Allen Toussaint), which premiered at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in October 2012.
Will has authored more than a dozen books for children and young adults, many co-written with his wife Mary Pope Osborne, including: the Magic Tree House Fact Tracker series, two retellings of Greek mythology, A Time To Dance for the My America series, and a picture book, Sleeping Bobby, with award-winning illustrator Giselle Potter. He has also created several highly acclaimed multi-media shows for the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, two of which featured William Shatner and the late Walter Cronkite.
Will is a member of the Dramatists Guild, a founder of The Writers Group in New York, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead vocalist and guitarist for the blues/R&B group WillPower.
