Watch This: Sixth-Grader's Dream of Putting on a Musical Becomes a Reality

Somewhere between third and fourth grade, things just clicked for young Paul Amrani.

Not only did he love musicals such as "Wicked" and "West Side Story," he wanted to write and produce his own. Little did his parents know that this was no passing fancy. Instead, it became an obsession, with nothing left to do but actually get serious and put it on.

So, with three years of tinkering and learning and support from his classmates and teachers at , his neighborhood in University Heights, and his parents, Amrani did just that.

This past week the 12-year-old and his Horn classmates put on a series of performances of Amrani's musical, "GOLDEN!" It's the story of a girl from a family of musicians who doesn't play an instrument. Ostracized, she runs away from home, with the other characters finally learning that it's OK to be different.

Paul and his classmates performed for a large segment of his peers not only at Horn Elementary, but also in the atrium at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

What was it like to see his musical finally performed?

"It was great. There was a lot of adrenalin with the whole cast," he said. "There were a lot of people, and it was great to be performing."

The final performance, held in the Amrani backyard, raised nearly $1,000 for the University of Iowa Children's Hospital, according to Amrani's mother, Amy Phelps. The crowd, many of them strangers to Paul, came largely as a result of cast members going from door to door with fliers advertising the show.

Phelps said she was thrilled to finally see the musical become a reality.

"It was amazing. He's been obsessed about it for years," she said. "I saw it go from this vision he had going in his head to something up there on stage."

Phelps, a cellist and music instructor at Coe College, has had to balance encouraging her son's passion and reeling him in when his dreams became a bit too ambitious.

"For a while, he wanted to hire a live orchestra and put it on at the Coralville Performing Arts Center. When I told him that would cost too much, he wanted to get a job mowing lawns to raise money, but I told him that doing this was so expensive that people have to write grants to get the money to pay for these productions," Phelps said. "So then, he checked out books on grant-writing from the library."

Despite Paul's venture into grant writing, he eventually settled for smaller venues, and seemed pleased with the results.

"A lot of people came up to me after the show and said, 'great job,' -- people I didn't even know, and it felt really good," he said.

One thing that delighted him most was the talent of his classmates, many of whom had never sung in a public venue.

"It was just really surprising to see how good kids were at singing and acting and stuff," Paul said. "Quite a few of them are really shy, so it was surprising to me to see them come out there and sing fantastically."

Phelps said that she was amazed at the support her son received, both from his teachers -- who turned the process of making the musical into an instructional opportunity -- from the faculty at Coe College who let them use sound equipment, to the neighbors who set up sound for the children and helped paint the stage.

"I couldn't have done it on my own," Phelps said.

The performance was also vindication for her musical-obsessed son, who hammered out an hour of songs and dialogue through trial and error from that initial spark years before when his father, Bernard Amrani, a composer, first showed him how to use musical composition software on his computer. Phelps said her son had been teased at school in 5th grade by classmates who couldn't quite understand why he kept talking endlessly about musicals, why he was so different.

"I told him, just wait until you get to junior high and you can be in show choir and be around other people like you," she said.

With the musical becoming a reality, Phelps said all of a sudden Amrani and the musical group were getting some positive attention.

Paul said finding a group of like minded peers was one of the best part of the experience.

"I was the only one at school who talked about musicals," Paul said. "All of a sudden I was with other people who talked about musicals. And I thought, hey, this is a good thing."

Of course, you know just one musical wouldn't be enough for the would be successor to Rogers & Hammerstein. But, always the dramaticist, Amrani would only offer up that it has something to do with a popular childhood character.

Here's a hint: red hair.