The man who led the Nashville Children’s Theater for the last three decades has died. Scot Copeland passed away suddenly overnight.

As a teen, Copeland co-founded a children’s theater in a small Alabama town. He went on to devote his entire career to producing plays for young audiences, saying he enjoyed how willing children were to follow along with all kinds of stories. At the Nashville Children’s Theater, he built a reputation for staging immersive shows that introduced kids to fanciful worlds, historical events, and great works of youth literature.

Before coming to Nashville, Copeland earned fine arts degrees from the University of Montevallo (where he met his wife and fellow thespian, Nashville Repertory Theatre director Rene Copeland) and UNC-Greensboro. He also spent time as the managing director of a youth theater near Washington, DC and handling educational outreach for the Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville.

The Nashville Children’s Theatre hired him to take over starting with the 1985 season. The NCT was already the nation’s oldest theater for young audiences, and under Copeland’s direction it became one of the most respected. In 2002, the NCT was named one of the top five children’s theaters in the nation by Time Magazine. Over three decades Copeland produced roughly 180 shows for the NCT. He wrote some of them (for example, this season’s Cinderella) and directed most. Every show hired a fully professional crew and cast members of the Actors Equity Union, many of whom also played in shows for Copeland’s wife at the Nashville Rep.

The news of his death comes on the day a new show is set to open. According to the theater’s Facebook page, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott will open as scheduled, “just as Scot would want.”