Where Did Death Sting First?

Death Takes a Holiday is becoming a musical, opening June 10 at the Roundabout in NYC. The NY Post shorthands the Albert Casella play on which it’s based as the basis for the Brad Pitt film Meet Joe Black, but theater junkies know it as a legendary, too-seldom-revived romantic drama from the 1930s. Connecticut theater junkies know it in particular because the American version of the play had its world premiere at the Stony Creek Puppet House in Branford. The Puppet House, which also boasts that Orson Welles made his first film there (as part of a summer-theater Mercury Players workshop), has been best known in the past half-century for housing—and actually using, in full-length battle spectaculars—a rare corps of colorful Sicilian marionettes collected by Grace Weil.
The Puppet House fell into disrepair a few years ago and was closed by Branford city officials due to code violations. There have been numerous plans (including this one) to reopen the place as a performing arts center, ending the dilapidated barnlike building’s own death-like holiday.
One other immediate Connecticut connection to the impending Death Takes a Holiday musical: its composer, Maury Yeston, of Nine fame, both studied and taught at Yale. One of his first shows, a musical based on Alice in Wonderland for the Footlights Club at Cambridge University which he composed as a graduate student between his Yale stints, had its American premiere at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 1971.