“I started to realize that writing musicals and children’s music would be something that I would really enjoy.”
At Cathedral, Breen’s interest in musicals blossomed early. “I started to realize that writing musicals and children’s music would be something that I would really enjoy,” he says. “I wanted to write musicals that were—looking back—pretty gender-neutral. No one was falling in love, there was no he/she stuff. The drama was not in that, the drama was in being a person.” Between 1985 and 2008, he wrote 25 original musicals with colorful and curious titles like Eighth Grade Angst , Mystery at the Men’s Club , and Hillsdale Blues . It was a prolific time during which his own two sons graduated from CSB, went on to Lowell High School and UC Berkeley, and eventually became teachers in their own rights. In 2002, Breen lost his wife and with her much of his desire to write new material. Life was calling for revision once again, and he uprooted to the city, a few blocks away from school, and decided to dig into professional devel- opment. “This was the place I needed to be, this was my home,” he says. “And I always thought I was a great music teacher, but I wasn’t, and I wanted to up my game.” In 2006, he earned a Master’s at Holy Names in Oakland and four years later went on to earn a Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he was named a fellow. He has since traveled the world lecturing annually on the topic, from Scotland to Malaysia. When Covid threw a wrench into school routines, Breen was terrified that his time at CSB was coming to a close as performing arts programs shut down in schools around the country. “I waited for the call saying, ‘your services are no longer needed,” he recalls. But a surprise call from Upper School Director Chad Harlow brought about an auspicious twist: “I was packing up downstairs and he said, ‘How’d you like to teach math?’ Golly, holy cow!” he laughs. “So that summer I did as much professional devel- opment as I could to be the best math teacher possible. With that came the ability to show up every day and feel engaged and excited, to come to school and be a steady, dependable force.” Fully prepared on the first day of the surreal 2020-21 school year teaching 6th grade math online, “math teacher” is now one more nod to the teacher “who can do anything,” as an anonymous student said. Breen’s program for the Upper School offers a broad variety of performance exposure, from learning handbells in 5th grade and conducting word-for-word reenactments of book passages to the highly anticipated 6th and 8th grade musicals.
Driven by story rather than the music, Breen’s musicals draw on current events, news stories, radio programs, even real-time conversations where “there’s usually a grain of public truth,” he says. For example, inspired by former Washington DC mayor Marion Barry, who was accused of fabricating his résumé, Breen penned Stranger Than Fiction , a musical about one person whose honor for telling the truth triggers other characters to lie about their own integrity. Themes of missing parental figures factor into many of the productions’ plots. On the Line , which debuted in 1986, around the time Breen’s father passed away, features a song called “TV Men,” which he wrote “during a time when there were sitcom shows where any problem could be solved in 23 minutes and all the fathers are geniuses.” In every aspect of a production, Breen shares his creative technique with his students, bringing his own findings back to the classroom to inspire their own ideas. One year, after
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