Dave Nettleman has lived in Plymouth for 24 years but has been writing and composing music for much longer than that.

Nettleman said he inherited a love of music from his parents. “Growing up, our home was always filled with music,” he said. “My siblings and I took up piano and other instruments.”

His musical interest began in elementary school and his third-grade teacher encouraged him to start writing lyrics at an early age.

In addition to piano, Nettleman took up trombone. He played in school bands, attended Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp every year and belonged to a music appreciation club which held composition contests that he entered.

Nettleman spent his summers as a pit musician for summer stock productions at the Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater, which is where he really started to take up an interest in musical theater.

He has been a church musician and has led orchestras and several brass groups, which gave him a lot of opportunities to arrange music and do some composing of his own.

Nettleman wrote a piece for his high school band and a wedding march for his sister’s wedding, which he humbly described as “small projects,” but now his biggest project yet – a full-length musical comedy – will be performed on stage this summer.

“I like to make people laugh and combine that with my love of music, so to me, a musical comedy was a natural way to express that,” Nettleman said.

He explained that he wrote his original show, “Gearheads,” in the style of the Golden Age musicals he grew up with like “Guys and Dolls, “The Music Man” and “Li’l Abner.”

“Gearheads” takes place in an auto repair shop on a Saturday when the shop’s owner and service manager are away, leaving the mechanics to run things. When a customer shows up needing a simple repair, she can’t get anyone to help her because the guys would rather be anywhere but work.

The mechanics turn their break room into a frat house and over the course of the day, love is lost and found, the youngest mechanic has a coming-of-age experience and the shop becomes a place where everyone belongs.

With sarcastic comedy in mind, he was able to write the opening scene and song before he put it away for a few weeks, curious to see if it would still hold up when he revisited the work.

“To my pleasant surprise, it held up and that was when I first thought it might be possible for me to write a whole show,” Nettleman said.

The entire show took Nettleman about four-and-a-half years to write and he made most of his progress on it during COVID.

Once written, “Gearheads” took about two years to bring to the stage, and Nettleman credits his creative team – Debbie Tedrick, Joey Albright, Alan Canning, Julie Steinmayer and Simon Nathan – for making it happen.

In a full circle moment, the world premiere of “Gearheads” will take place August 10-11 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre on the University of Michigan campus, the same place Nettleman played in the pit orchestra for a production of “Carousel” 45 years ago. Tickets are available through the Michigan Union Ticket Office.