Thomaston hosts spooky tours beyond Halloween
THOMASTON HOSTS SPOOKY TOURS
The Landmark Community Theatre in Thomaston, Connecticut, opened its doors to host two spooky haunted opera house tours: “Theatre of Macabre” and “Graveside Stories.,” on Oct. 22. The theatre will be hosting these tours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings through Nov. 7.
The theatre’s opening weekend in March turned into its closing weekend due to the pandemic. This is the first performance the theatre is having since the onset of COVID- 19.
“We were looking for ideas on how to get reopened but still manage social separation during COVID- 19,” said Jeffrey Dunn, executive director for Landmark Community Theatre at Thomaston Opera House. “Several years ago back in the ‘ 80s, before we were doing theatre here… they had haunted house tours and they were very successful, so I thought this might be the time to try and resurrect it.”
The “Theatre of the Macabre” tour is held inside the old firehouse and features a maze of theatre- based haunts from “Sweeney Todd” to “Little Shop of Horrors” and even a thrilling scene from “Carrie.”
“Theatre of Macabre” is set in a dark room with twisted music filling people’s ears until screams begin ringing through the hall and stage lights appear as actors perform scenes from the Halloween favorites. Each micro- performance was once performed in its entirety on the opera house stage.
Simone Matusevice, who is an usherette in the “Rocky Horror Show,” is excited to be back on stage after months of being deprived of the spotlight. “I’m just glad to be back on the stage, really, I missed it a lot with COVID and shutting everything down. I was so excited to be in a production again... even just this little bit of being back on stage has been great,” she said.
The second tour, called “Graveside Stories,” is based on true accounts of residents that were once buried on the site of what is currently the Thomaston Opera House and old firehouse, but was the Northbury Burial Grounds from 1742 to 1875. Tour guides in this section of the event portray residents from the 1800s and share the historic memories of the deceased.
“I’ve loved it, I love supporting the opera house,” said Lisa Dupre, a patron. “I was impressed with how they portrayed the people that had been buried here.”
After descending into the basement area of the original town hall, guests follow a path through the basement lined with graves and actors sharing the dramatized stories of the buried souls. The basement is where the bodies were buried over 140 years earlier.
Each tour runs through the east and west wings of the opera house until both meet in the middle, center stage in the auditorium.
There, the groups are distantly seated by cohort and entertained by Juan Cardona Jr. playing on the Marr Colton Theatre Pipe Organ, accompanied by short Halloweenthemed silent films and some live entertainment by volunteer performers.
“This isn’t like a ‘ gross you out and scare you’ type of tour,” said Dunn. Dunn hopes people will walk away with a knowledge of how people lived hundreds of years ago and what that meant to the history of Thomaston.