Mr. Willy (also sometimes known as “Willy Welch”) is a children’s entertainer, picture book author and recording artist who brings his songs and stories (and sometimes puppets) to schools, churches, child care centers, preschools- wherever! As of Sept. 2019, Mr. Willy will be based in Great Barrington, Mass. after 30 years in Dallas, Tx.
He has performed at hospitals, arts festivals, butterfly releases, birthday parties, bookstores and store openings. Willy penned over 35 of the songs that “Barney and Friends” sing on their PBS television show. He was also a staff songwriter for the “Boz the Green Bear Next Door” DVD series, contributing about twenty tunes.
Mr. Willy has written and performed for (and with) thousands of children under the auspices of Arts Partners and Big Thought – leading singing with elementary children and working with them on expressing themselves through their own songs. He has recored four albums of children’s songs, three of which are available on CD and/or on-line at places like Spotify and I-Tunes.
Mr. Willy has an ability to see the world through a child’s eyes, and the children listening and singing with him know they are with a friend!
Willy often performs with his wife, the actress Wendy Welch, as the folk/gospel duo “Wendy & Willy” at camps and churches throughout the country, as well as for Young Audiences. They have recorded three albums together.
A graduate of the Boston University School for the Arts, Willy Welch has been writing and performing for many years. He is probably best known for composing “Playing Right Field,” the heart-warming tale of an inept young baseball player, which has been recorded and performed by over a dozen recording artists, most notably Peter Paul & Mary, who recorded it for the third time (as a greatest hit!) in 1998 on the CD Around the Campfire. Many people are also familiar with the Right Field story as a double-Clio award-winning Pizza Hut commercial!
“Playing Right Field” was released as a children’s picture book by Scholastic, Inc. in 1995 with illustrations by Caldecott-award winning artist Marc Simont. His second book, “Dancing with Daddy” was a fall 1999 release from Whispering Coyote Press (an imprint of Charlesbridge Publishing), who also published “Grumpy Bunnies” – aka “Grumbly Bunnies” in March, 2000. “Grumbly Bunnies” was released as a paperback in 2009.
Willy’s other song hits include “Whole Lotta Fishin’,” featured in the Dallas Theatre Three musical Ball Games, “I’m Gonna Hold Onto You,” recorded by RSVP, and “House of the Carpenter,” a theme song for Habitat for Humanity. Pretending to be a grown-up, Willy wrote a rockabilly musical version of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” performed by the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas.
Willy has had a long and varied career as an actor. His most recent gig was performing with the Tony-award-winning star Lilias White in the two-person musical “Texas in Paris,” an off-Broadway hit that he and Ms. White have started doing on the road. He last performed in New York at the 59E59 theatre in the Off-Broadway musical “Flipside, The Patti Page Story” and has since periodically toured around the nation with that show. Willy also had a long-running gig as the King of Spain at the renowned “Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament” in Dallas, Texas, where he learned how to ride an Andalusian stallion! Now that the show as changed, Willy appears as the Lord Chancellor to the new monarch, the Queen Maria Isabella.
Willy appeared as the disciple Matthew in “The Cotton Patch Gospel” at Theatre Three’s downstairs Theatre Too, (2015) as well as portraying General Robert E. Lee (and a number of other historical characters) in “A Civil War Christmas” on the Theatre Three main stage. Earlier, Willy portrayed Woody Guthrie in the musical “Woody Guthrie’s American Song” at Theatre Too (summer, 2009).
DFW Metroplex theater audiences have also seen Willy as Farmer Brown in “Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type,” at the Dallas Children’s Theatre (Jan-Feb, 2009) and simultaneously in two Christmas musicals: “The Gifts of the Magi” at PFamily Arts in Plano, and “A Sanders Family Christmas” for 1:30 Productions at the Bath House Cultural Center.
Before that, he was FDR in “Annie” at Bass Hall in Fort Worth (Dec. 2008). He was also proud to be in the world premier of the musical “The Winner” at Lyric Stage (2007), as a member of an all-star cast at Watertower Theatre (Addison) for “Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues” (2004), as Wink in “A Country Life,” also at Watertower (2005) and the Clyde’s dad and the Dallas County Sheriff in “Bonnie and Clyde” (2014); as Jim in “Pump Boys and Dinettes” at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas (2004), and in “Cotton Patch Gospel” at Dallas Theater Center (2003), New Harmony Theatre in Evansville, Ind. and Casa Manana in Ft. Worth; as Uncle Stanley in “Smoke on the Mountain” at Granbury Opera House (2005), and as Lloyd in “Guys on Ice” at Circle Theatre in Ft. Worth. He also starred as the Balladeer/Proprietor in Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” at Theater 3 way back in 1992.
Before he moved to Texas, New York and Boston audiences saw him in dozens of productions, including “Dracula,” the title character in “The Marlowe Show,” in “The Jim Thorpe Story,” “Geography of a Horse Dreamer,” “Tartuffe” and “Cowboy, the Musical.”
Willy is the father of Second City L.A. improv actor Grady James Welch and NYC actor/singer/dancer Molly Bess Welch. He is also proud to be a member of the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP), Actors Equity Association (AEA), and PFLAG.