History of the Theatre

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time, or to be more specific, in 1866, a small, non-denominational church was built at 128 Thimble Islands Road in the village of Stony Creek in Branford, CT, and was established as a gathering place for everyone, permanent residents and summer visitors alike. A fire damaged the property in 1900, and in 1914, the land was sold to William Howd. And although the building would no longer be a chapel, its tradition as a community gathering place would continue as the foundations were laid for a silent picture movie theater, called Idle Hour Moving Pictures. 

The Parish Players

Idle Hour Moving Pictures was short-lived as a movie hall, because in 1923 a theater group belonging to the Stony Creek Church of Christ called the Parish Players was forming. In 1928, the Parish Players purchased the movie theater space, and repurposed it to fit its needs. The building at 128 Thimble Island Rd. became home to “live” theater for the first time, and thus began the birth of live entertainment from its stage! The group set about fundraising to build an addition to the building to suit the stage for performances. The Parish Players performed many productions in the theater, including the world premiere of Death Takes a Holiday. Popular productions such as Private Lives, Merrily We Roll Along and Pygmalion were among the seasons’ performances. 

A Dramatic Turn of Events

During those wonderfully special years inside the theater walls, many celebrity icons graced the boards, including the likes of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. Three years before Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane, he wrote and directed a silent film Too Much Johnson. The film was shot in 1938 to be integrated into Welles’s Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. Welles initially planned to present the stage-and-film mix of Too Much Johnson at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut as a pre-Broadway trial run, but discovered that the theater’s ceiling was too low to allow for film projection. The show opened on August 16, 1938, without the filmed sequences. Welles never completed editing the film component for Too Much Johnson and put the footage in storage. He rediscovered it three decades later at his home outside of Madrid, Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was”, he later recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it, as though it had only been through a projector once or twice before. It had a fine quality.” Welles, however, never allowed the footage to be seen publicly, stating the film would not make sense outside of the full context of the Gillette play. In August 1970,a fire broke out at Welles’s villa and the only known complete print of Too Much Johnson was destroyed. However, in a dramatic turn of events, a copy was discovered in Italy in 2008, and on August 5, 2013, the George Eastman House museum of film and photography in the U.S. announced that it had completed a long process of restoration together with Cinemazero, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and laboratory experts in the U.S. and the Netherlands. It will be exciting to one day integrate the film Too Much Johnson and Gillette play in the very theater in Stony Creek as Orson Welles had first intended!

The Theater’s Changing Roles...

Along came World War II, and life changed for everyone. It changed for the theater, too. Although it is unconfirmed, it is rumored that the Stony Creek Theatre played its patriotic role as a parachute factory, contributing to the war effort. After the war ended, the building continued its role as a factory. From 1946-1960 the theater building became home to Materna-Line, Inc., a designer and manufacturer of corsets and the likes! Its 14 year run under this reign made many ladies, young and old, perfectly underdressed for all occasions! 

Enter Puppets...

Entertainment returned to the building when Grace Weil established the space as a Puppet Museum in 1961. Among the cast of World Puppets were 52 nearly life-sized Sicilian puppets direct from performances in Italy! Grace Weil’s son, Jim, and Italian Salvatore Macri, were the next to put their mark on the theater. With their rare and cherished skills of puppetry, the Italian puppets came to life. The great era and all that they did to bring this Italian art form to America—and to this special corner of the earth—is a true legacy. There were many who were under the tutelage of those artists who made the Stony Creek Theatre their home over the years. Classes and youth theater were in abundance under those in the Parish Players era as well as with Weil, Barry Fritz, Joe Davis, the Alliance Theatre, and others. 

A True Legacy

After many years of delighting audiences with its varied presentations of music, art, and theatre, the Puppet House began to show and feel its age. In recent years, the Legacy Theatre purchased this grand lady to restore the theatre to its former glory.