To hear a five minute interview with Tommy Brent recorded a few years before his death, click here.
.A proper history of Tommy Brent's Theatre by-the-Sea must begin with the first person account written by Matilda J. "Tillie" Tyler, whose mother Alice Jaynes Tyler conceived of and had constructed TBTS (Theatre by-the-Sea) in 1933. Tillie wrote this historical account at Tommy's request in 1976.
Until her death in 1992, Tillie Tyler summered in her residence located on the beach path behind TBTS. This charming 4,000-word piece has hitherto not been published, although it is quoted liberally in Jim Seavor's comprehensive 1983 history which can be seen at
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| Tillie Tyler's summer home and carriage house. |
My parents rented the Browning Farm, which this place was, in 1920 and bought it early in 1921. We used the Inn as our home then, but rented half of it to friends every summer. Mother built the Theatre in 1933 and rented it to various producers until 1941. In 1942 and 1943 it was dark because of the War, and in 1944 and 1945 it was operated as a movie house, much-appreciated by the gasless local summer community. Before the War, Mrs. Tyler never ran the Theatre herself, although she often “gave advice” to those who did. She did run the Inn except for two summers. After the War she rented both Inn and Theatre each year until 1951. At her death in that year her daughters continued with the lease and tenants she had left behind.
People often ask why Mother made the barn into a theatre. Where did she get the idea? I can’t answer that, merely recount events. Mother was left a widow in 1928, and she had three children, eight to twelve years in age. [Tillie was the eldest].
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| The Browning Cottage a/k/a The Inn and (to the right) The Staff House |
Our home was in New Haven , but Mother was unwilling to part with the property in Rhode Island . At first she used the house as a summer camp for girls, and for boys she bought a property at Green Hill. But the depression was with us, and fewer and fewer people were able to afford camps, let alone new camps.
One of Mother’s enthusiasms was Greek dancing, and for a couple of summers we and some of the girls in the neighborhood were “stuck” with sessions of Greek dancing every morning before swimming. Our attitude must have been hard on the imported dancing teacher. One year Miss Caroline Hazard asked Mother to put on a dancing pageant for one of the community garden parties at Peace Dale in her really beautiful rose garden.
Mother had a great imagination and in some areas was also fantastically far-sighted, positively prescient. There were times too when she could not (or would not) see facts right under her nose. The early 30’s was the period when summer theatres were mushrooming all over the place, and somehow someone or something got Mother going on this one.
Her “reasoning” was that when she saw so many people out of work-- and looking ahead to her own children getting out of college and having no jobs-- she thought she’d aid both situations by creating jobs in building the barn into a theatre and provide jobs for us later on.
The fact that there might be a limited market of people with interest and money for theatre tickets or a shortage of impresarios who wanted to bring companies to a theatre between two cornfields-- or that her children might lack in their interest in the theatre-- did not deter her. I don’t believe she did any research to speak of into how existing summer theatres were faring. She was nothing if not enthusiastic, however, and she was certain that there were a lot of young theatre people in New York who would love to come to a theatre at the Rhode Island seashore for the Actor’s Equity $25 weekly minimum, and that the theatre would flourish, bringing in sufficient rent to support the property, in short that her barn theatre would be a huge success.
The barn of the Browning Farm was built in two sections. One was the original Browning barn, well over a hundred years old. It had six or eight stalls for horses. There were mangers in the corners of these stalls with little trap doors above them for hay to be poked down from the hay-loft to the horses. If you look around the auditorium of the present Theatre, you can see these mangers doing an ineffective job as light shields beside the beams of the side walls during matinees.
The rest of the barn, now the auditorium, was used for carriages of the boarders at the Inn . Late in the last century, the Brownings had started taking summer boarders, and apparently this custom was so profitable that they added a large part of what is now the Inn to the original farmhouse and enlarged the barn to include what is now the auditorium.
During our childhood, Mother wanted us to have a little playhouse of our own and had the hay-loft fixed up as a stage and some footlights installed. She was a bit unrealistic, as the stage was set at a lower level than the audience, and the “green rooms” were lower yet, but we enjoyed it. The hand hewn timbers we had to leap over from stage to “green room” are now the triangle above the proscenium arch of the present stage.
Mother usually talked things over with me before she went ahead with a project, but I don’t remember much discussion of a theatre. When I arrived at the beach after school was out in 1933, the building of the stage was well underway. It might be a barn theatre, but it was a vastly altered barn. The older part of the barn had been torn down, and immense structural twelve by twelve timbers were in place, soaring almost sixty feet in the air. [The actual stage roof height is just shy of forty feet]. These became the “studs” of the new stage, and it grew around them. A stage had to be high enough to “fly” the scenery. Theatre by-the-Sea was from its beginning an unusually easy stage to work on because of its height and space. Its major drawback was (and still is) so little space for entrances and exits on stage right. This crammed condition was unavoidable because of the driveway which runs past the Theatre to the Inn and the houses further down the path.
My remembrances of the Theatre’s first summer are limited because I was in Ireland . I had been asked to visit my Mother’s Bryn Mawr classmate, Mrs. Robert Flaherty, whose husband was making the movie “Man of Aran,” and they wanted company for their three daughters. I demurred about going, seeing what she’d started, but Mother was determined, and I was shipped off, regardless. Even teenage children obeyed better in the 30’s.
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| The original 300-seat TBTS sometime between 1933 and the 1938 hurricane, before repairs included installing a balcony |
When I have a chance to re-read and study the letters which I received that summer I may recall more of the Theatre’s preparation and opening in August. I might find out how Mother got in touch with that summer’s producers Leo Bulgakov [1899-1948] and [actor] Leslie Spiller, who had a Broadway success that year with Francesca Bruning in One Sunday Afternoon. I might find out whether she got “talked into” building the Theatre in the first place. [Twenty-three year old future Broadway lighting designer Abe Feder (1910-1987) oversaw the construction of the stage by New Bedford shipbuilders.]
What I do remember is that the path of partnership or landlady-tenant relationship did not run smoothly. The Theatre opened finally the first week of August with Strictly Dynamite, and I was told later that a black kitten behaving according to the title ran down the aisle during the first performance. The kitten was adopted by the Hales who named it “Dynamite.”
When I got home from Ireland , it was to a Mother who was exhausted and worried. Bulgakov and Spiller were out of the picture entirely, and Mother was in financial difficulties. Everything has cost more than expected. She had no theatre experience herself, and here she was the owner of a fine summer stage, a house with three-hundred plus seats, and there was no one to operate it. And the country was going deeper into the depression.
The next spring she devoted to forays into New York to meet with people who might possibly want to rent a theatre by the sea in Rhode Island , a theatre which had a total of four weeks operational experience. Most people had never heard of it. Many were living on a hope and a prayer, and it wasn’t until late in the spring that Teddy Hammerstein [Theodore J. Hammerstein, 1901-1973] and Dufour [Denis Du-For] came to an agreement with Mother whereby they operated the Theatre for that summer. For summer 1934, the Theatre was financially wobbly, but it was functioning.
The spring after that, Hammerstein was out of the picture. I don’t recall if it was one of Mother’s intermittent periods of warfare with the world, or whether he’d lost too much money or made too little to be interested. Roosevelt ’s schemes for leavening the economy were under way, and Hammerstein may have had other, better fish to fry. In any event, T. Edward Hambleton [1911-2005] now and for many years past the moving spirit of the Phoenix Theatre off-Broadway, rented the Theatre from Mother for the next three years and brought pleasant company and good theatre with him. Mother wasn’t getting a return on her investment, but she was supporting current expenses, and T was a good tenant and as considerate of Mother as it was possible to be. She was not always eager to get along with, however lofty her motives might be.
It is to T that we owe the wheel chandeliers in the Theatre and the beginning of the extension of the bar patio at the Inn . In 1937 his final season, T operated the Inn as well.
The next summer a Yale drama group, their name lost in the mist of time and newspaper microfilm, [The Vanguards] ran the Theatre and did well enough with it. Then in September came the hurricane. We’d spent our summers in Rhode Island for eighteen years and had had no such blow. The great “studs,” the twelve by twelve timbers which supported the stage house were broken by the force of the wind. The Theatre was “stove in” all along the back, the stage roof was in splinters in the farmer’s field across the road, and the scene shop was flattened to the ground.
Mother was a woman of infinite resource, if not always sagacity, and she did two things. She applied to the Small Business Administration for a loan to rebuild the Theatre, and she put an ad in a Philadelphia paper (that area being one of unusually high unemployment) for people to do land clearance at $1 a day and their room and board. She received an avalanche of replies which filled a large carton. We never got to read all of them. It’s hard for us to imagine the state of the world then in these times, before the War raised wages and a boom period continued them to astronomic heights. We were still in the depression, and Mother’s ad must have read “any port in a storm” to several hundred people.
From the replies, Mother hired a steel worker and certified engineer, and the steel worker’s wife came as a housekeeper. Mother wasn’t being mean. She would have liked to pay more. But her own resources were very slender, had never really recovered from building the Theatre in the first place, and she never really faced up to the idea of abandoning her project, paying or not paying. She still thought it would be a treasure trove someday. There must be a fine line between fools and geniuses.
Between these workers, however, with Mother chivying from the side lines and a bit of extra help now and then, those men put that theatre back into operating order. It must have been bleak work. They lived in the Inn with the coal stove going in the kitchen. There’s a lot of wind off the sea all year at Matunuck, and that theatre [stage house] is a long way up.
The only good thing to come out of the hurricane was that while Mother was making repairs, she decided also to make improvements. It had been apparent that a 300-seat theatre was not an economic entity. Therefore, more seats were needed. Believe it or not, the join between the box office lobby section and the auditorium was cut with a saw, a hand saw. A rope was attached to the box office section, and our dump truck pulled it toward the road. The intervening space was built up as a new section of the Theatre, complete with balcony.
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| The improved 539-seat TBTS with balcony |
Meanwhile, Mother was also occupied with getting someone to run the Theatre for the summer of 1939. In spite of economic advantage of double the number of seats, an act of faith on Mother’s part, there were many doubts as to the public’s support of the whole area. Many houses had been blown down or washed away in the hurricane. Many people were just plain scared. Had the gradually augmented audience of the last few years been washed away? was the great question.
As I write I have no records with me. The theatre did operate in 1939 and 1940, but the names of the operators escape me. In 1941 [Broadway actor] Jackson Halliday ran both Inn and Theatre. It operated with increasing audiences but with no profit to speak of and often losses to owner and producer. Then came the War and gas rationing.
During the War, the chief function of the Theatre by-the-Sea, which could be easily spotted from the air, was as a target spot for military planes practicing diving. A radio-communications truck was parked in the driveway, and its operators notified the pilots if they were on or off target. When she was there, Mother gave them coffee and doughnuts, and I’m sure she talked politics and pacifism, because by this time she was convinced both Roosevelt and Churchill had horns and a tail. Despite this, she wrote the army offering to be parachuted into Sicily where she’d once spent four months so to show our army the way around. By this time she was deafer than ever, had a bad back, and spoke Italian poorly. To me this showed only her usual “up and at ‘em” outlook. But then, she had no theatre producers to harry.
The Theatre operated as a movie house in 1944. There was a box of unused tickets in the office above the box office, and during the War Mother allowed some of the neighboring children (now raising their own children at Matunuck) to “play theatre” with her. This playing with old tickets is one of their fondest memories.
The end of the War in Germany in 1945 occurred too late in the spring for Mother to be able to reactive the Theatre for that summer, and it ran one more season as a movie house. Then [Edward Gould] took over as manager of both Theatre and Inn for two years, and Mother came to regard him as a major disaster.
He was followed by [Broadway manager] Al Jones for the season of 1948, 1949 and 1950. Jones ran the Theatre effectively, but it is for his shows after the theatre in the bar that he is best remembered at Matunuck. He introduced the cabaret setup. Drinks in the bar had always been popular [before] during and after the plays, but with the Keane sisters as a semi-permanent attraction, that side of business boomed. It was SRO in the dining room and bar every evening. And it was really delightful, funny fun!
[To read more about the 1951 season click on http://tommybrent.blogspot.com/2014/08/gleason-and-kean-1951-sisters.html].
[To read more about the 1951 season click on http://tommybrent.blogspot.com/2014/08/gleason-and-kean-1951-sisters.html].
In 1950-51 Mother was approached by two young men, Donald Wolin and Harold Schiff [1919-1995], the latter a New York [entertainment] attorney, who very much wished to operate Theatre by-the-Sea. Mother had developed criticisms of Al Jones by that time, and the Wolin-Schiff team was willing to pay a higher rent, so in the spring of 1951 she signed a lease with them. Within weeks she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of complications following an operation, but happy about one thing, that she had turned her pet project over to fine, competent people. She would have liked much what Wolin and Schiff did and the way they did it. They ran the Theatre and Inn for seven summers, and certainly the Theatre hosted more star names during this period than ever before or since.
[To read more about the 1954 season click on http://tommybrent.blogspot.com/2014/08/1954-program-books.html].
[To read more about the 1954 season click on http://tommybrent.blogspot.com/2014/08/1954-program-books.html].
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| Grid dimension courtesy of Kevin Hill of Bill Hanney's Theatre by-the-Sea |
It was in that period, however, that the “package” system, as applied to summer theatres, developed. Early in summer theatre history, stars, for a price, would come and play with a theatre’s company. Next the stars wanted a few supporting players of their choosing “to make rehearsing easier” with each theatre they played. The theatres at that point might be paying two salaries, to a visiting player and a resident player, now idle. To sign the star, whom they believed would be good business for them, the managers went along with it. The next step, however, was for the star to bring practically the whole cast, a package except for bits and walk-ons. This practice made it murder for the managers, who might have a package each week but who also had to maintain a certain number of resident Equity actors if they wanted to remain an “A” company. The overlap became too expensive.
Following the seven year tenancy of Wolin and Schiff, during which the prestige and status of Theatre by-the-Sea and its capacity to make money were increased ten-fold, in 1959 their business manager replaced them as manager. He turned out to be less of a business man than he appeared at first, and the season was a complete disaster.
The next season the Theatre “went dark.” Mrs. Tyler’s heirs were not as successful at securing a new manager as their Mother had been, and before the year was out they had sold the property to the Bontecou family who still own it. [The Bontecou family sold the property in 2006.]
Under Bontecou ownership, the Theatre was operated by John Holmes for three summers, “went dark” for several more, and was about to be torn down I understand when Mr. Brent took it over.
Mr. Brent is in his tenth season of operation of both Theatre and Inn , and I gather business has built up steadily. He is unlikely to have to contend with rebuilding the theatre after a hurricane, as after the 1954 Hurricane Carol, when we rebuilt the duplicate of the 1938 conditions with advice from an outstanding architectural firm, and the stage now has a magnificent steel brace. We have been assured that the building will hold tight in the face of the worst imaginable blow.
Mr. Brent does not depend on stars. He is running the Theatre as Mother had always hoped it would be operated, cannily, entertainingly with a give and take relationship with its South County New York for all their staffs. The Theatre is now providing a more than statewide center of entertainment which Mother would have liked, as well as giving jobs and getting people to the seashore for the summer, which were two of her aims in building the playhouse.
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| Theatre by-the-Sea after Hurricane Carol, 1954 Providence-Journal photo. |
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| Stage hurricane bracing can be seen upstage of this rehearsal of "Candide" in 1976 |
Another aim was to have it self-supporting, and it must be doing that too, or Tommy Brent wouldn’t still be here.
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Mother came from a Pennsylvania Presbyterian family which might have been aghast at what their descendant was to do. In some ways she was strictly raised. No card playing or any activity constituting a diversion were allowed on Sundays. Her grandmother once reproved her, “Alice I can see your ankle, dear.”
Mother lived in St. Louis as a child but went to Bryn Mawr College with the class of 1905, from East Orange , New Jersey
Mother was an ebullient person and must have had missionary blood somewhere. After college she worked for the Consumers’ League of New Jersey for better labor laws for women. One day, so that she could better lecture impromptu a male audience on the subject of working conditions for women, she had hopped into a touring car where a man was demonstrating tires. Apparently the dealer was too flabbergasted to stop her. The local newspaper headlined, “Miss Jaynes Steals an Audience.” She required attention, and she got it.
Her work brought her into contact with Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, and she used this association to get us out of a scrape in Sicily . She talked so much about him that some local officials didn’t dare charge her for a stuck door she’d kicked in on a train.
She was a borderline suffragist who was never sent to jail, but she had me baptized by Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. I have always treasured Dr. Shaw’s reply to a New Havener who must have referred to his ancestry. “When anyone tells me they are descended from a noted person, I always reply, ‘Yes, you have descended.’”
My father Leonard S. Tyler was a manufacturer, and he and Mother met when she came to discuss the working conditions in his factory, which employed a number of women. His brother was the president, and Dad the vice-president. My father was also a brave man because during World War I he brought to New Haven as a bride a woman not only college-educated (the only one of four sisters-in-law), but also deaf, a suffragist, and a pretty vociferous pacifist.
In connection with her pacifism, I tried to tell Mother she was inconsistent. If she had been a real pacifist, she would never call on the police for help, nor would she use the law in a disagreement. She couldn’t see it. Nations ought to be pacific in international affairs, she insisted, but when it came to interpersonal relations, it was perfectly all right to call to her side any “force” that might be necessary.
It’s much duller in South County
She enlivened town meetings, and I’m sure “used” her deafness in her downrightness, and often obdurateness, about local issues at these sessions. It often made for feisty gatherings, and in any relationship she could be so exasperating that you wanted to shake her. Many South Countians remember her, approach me as “Mrs. Tyler’s daughter” and tell me how they worked for Mother or were associated with her in some way. They may have parted “brass rags” at the time, but not to hear them tell it now.
For those who do remember, she’s still a presence at her Theatre and in the community. I enjoy all my recollections with my neighbors and thank them for them. Perhaps Theatre by-the-Sea will be her longest lasting remembrance. For those of us who enjoy it, we can all hope so.
Tommy amended Miss Tyler's history in a program book blurb in 1980.
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Tommy amended Miss Tyler's history in a program book blurb in 1980.
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| August 21, 1992 Providence Journal Obituary for Matilda J. "Tillie" Tyler |
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In 1937, Alice Jaynes Tyler published her monograph which asserted that James Audubon was also the Dauphin. Tommy Brent's very first encounter with Alice Tyler was an interview with her in New York in the 1940's where she proposed to hire him to manage a production of "I Who Should Command All" which would run all summer. Tommy declined. Thanks to Eliza Collins for telling me about the book.
Tommy's second contact with TBTS was in 1950 when he traveled to several houses on the summer stock loop as an A.D. for and actor in a promotional film entitled "Young Man in a Straw Hat." No trace of the movie can be located.
Leo Shull (1906-1996) who was known primarily as the publisher of the NYC trade paper Show Business also published Summer Theatres from 1940 until the 80's. Tommy worked for Shull in the 40's hawking (along with Lauren Bacall) the daily Actor's Cues which listed that days' auditions.
From the 1951 edition is the listing for TBTS:
and a paid ad for Tommy's McLean, Virginia playhouse.
The 1958 edition contains a paid ad for TBTS and Tommy's summary of correspondence concerning his potential employment for that summer, with TBTS at the top of the list. He was hired in the position of Press agent not Business Manager, more in line with his (then) expertise.
Although Tommy worked for many theatres, his summer at Matunuck convinced him that, if he could, he would like to spend the rest of his life there.
Nine years later, Tommy discovered that TBTS was to be demolished, and he sprung into action. It is doubtful that he had any money to speak of, but he had faith and drive. He initially sought out partners, but Tommy was a one-man-band, and that was the end of that.
Below is Tommy's prospectus written to attract investors and talent to TBTS, written in early 1967, courtesy of Charlie Kondek. The only exaggeration is the assertion that the TBTS stage is that of "Broadway size." Actually it is nearer to 3/4 scale.
Tommy consulted Laurence Feldman the producer for whom he had worked in the 1960's who operated the Mineola Playhouse, Paper Mill, Falmouth and Westport.
The prospective rebirth of TBTS excited some locals as is evident in this February, 1967 page one piece from the Narragansett Times.
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Tommy's entrance into Matunuck was nothing if not theatrical. In a plea for donations following the 1970 fire which burned the staff house to the ground, he wrote,
Summer stock until the 1960's was a tony affair, where well-heeled patrons attended openings in black tie. Because Broadway legit houses were not air-conditioned, they shuttered during the summer months. Both audience and stage attraction migrated to venues in cooler climes.
``Every opening night was formal,'' said Tommy in a 1999 interview with Arline Fleming, adding that theater patrons came mostly from
"The locals didn't go," he said, ``because they thought it was too expensive. Top ticket prices were about $3.50."
``It was an exclusive place. It got loads of publicity in the
Such was also the case at McLean, Virginia where in the late 40's and early 50's Tommy operated the Summer Theatre. He liked that that the future first lady had interviewed his company, which included Equity apprentice Frances Sternhagen.
One of Tommy's wealthy McLean patrons was Susan Bontecou DuVal whose family owned a compound of summer residences on the beach behind TBTS.
In 1959 Tillie Tyler and her siblings sold TBTS to the Bontecou clan.
Tommy's attempts to lease TBTS was greatly aided by his fortuitous Susan DuVal connection. He elaborated on her friendship in a letter to the editor in response to her 1997 obit.
In the 1983 Jim Seavor article, Tommy explained further:
As this article from the Providence Journal of July 2, 1967 aptly claims, Tommy had quite literally gone for broke.
Ken Eulo directed six of Tommy's eight productions for that first 1967 season, Eulo pictured here at the stair to the dressing rooms in the stage right wing, giving notes to crew (left) and cast.
Tommy (center) seated at his refurbished bar, following a performance of Barefoot in the Park, also in 1967. Tommy's choice of cigarette was Kent, and his drink a Manhattan-- straight up, no cherry.
The Inn Tommy transformed from this
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Tommy was putting asses in seats and making friends in Rhode Island when he suffered a setback of such severity that he came close to giving it all up. Before the 1970 season got underway, the Staff house, the smaller structure to the right of the Inn, burned to the ground. This 1967 photo illustrates the dilapidated condition of the physical plant which Tommy inherited. (Compare to the photo of Browning's Inn.)
He describes the fire and aftermath in a mailing piece to his subscribers, his first public mention of St. Jude.
Tommy was a devout Catholic, and St. Jude began his regular appearance in the programs commencing with the season following the fire.
Despite the fire, Tommy plowed ahead with the 1970 season, as described in this Providence Journal article.
In the end, the only casualty of the fire was Mame. Within a year, a winterized replica of the Staff House was constructed, and a new office was built, far from the madding crowd, photo courtesy Kate Alken.
Tommy was a devout Catholic, and St. Jude began his regular appearance in the programs commencing with the season following the fire.
Despite the fire, Tommy plowed ahead with the 1970 season, as described in this Providence Journal article.
In the end, the only casualty of the fire was Mame. Within a year, a winterized replica of the Staff House was constructed, and a new office was built, far from the madding crowd, photo courtesy Kate Alken.
The theatre stage in 1979:
Tommy at the Inn with the Pepe family in 1969. The Pepe's operated Hopkins Press which printed every single program book shown here. Left to right, unknown waitress, Tommy, Arlene, Antonietta, Jerry, and Jim Pepe.
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In Tommy's first summer, he presented nine straight plays in an eleven-week season, meaning one-week stock with two shows held over. He ventured slowly into musicals, presenting his first in 1969, and by 1975 musicals outnumbered straight plays, and that season also marked the shift to two-week stock. In 1979 he presented his final straight play, and runs was expanded to three weeks. In 1983 he reduced the number of attractions to four, each running a month, and Tommy stuck with that policy until the end in 1988.
Tommy also close to go non-Equity. A great many Equity actors played leads for him under assumed names.
Tommy also close to go non-Equity. A great many Equity actors played leads for him under assumed names.
To view a table showing a complete listing of Tommy's productions including creative teams, click on http://tommybrent.blogspot.com/2014/08/table-of-shows-and-creative-teams.html
The table shows Jay Dias, John Kroner and Fred Barton to have music-directed the most shows; Derek Wolshonak and Jerry Yoder, choreographed the most; and Charles Ard for scenery and lighting.
Two directors which began the second season (1968) share the honors for most-directed, Bucky Walsh and Charlie Kondek, both equally flamboyant. Bucky, shown here on the Inn stair with two starstruck boys circa 1968, directed twenty "straight" plays including Boys in the Band.
Bucky also brought with him his lovely wife, Nikki Bruno, who starred in many of his shows.
Charlie Kondek shown here to the left of Tommy on the front porch in 2009, directed 22 shows (mainly musicals) over 21 seasons including the final 42nd Street.
Charlie holds the distinction of once being Tommy Brent's employer.
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Tommy planned for years to write a history of his theatre, but never did. His "From the Producer" column, which ran occasionally in his program books, offers the closest thing we have to a proper chronology of his thoughts and actions.
The 1968 season, where he complains of bad business, blames the lack of good attractions, "becomes enlightened" and promises to do better the next year.
Tommy experimented with alternatives to his mainstage productions, starting in 1968 with a 16mm film series. It was a flop and was not repeated.
Another flop was grand opera which was presented throughout the 1970 season by Marguerite Ruffiino, who had moved her company from Manhattan to Providence.
The third experiment, kids' musicals, was a great success and continued from his third season until the twenty-second.
Tommy was very receptive to audience comments (1969),
and at the end of the season presented his pitch for patrons to donate so to "send an actor to summer stock." The fate of this unique program is not known.
1971 marked a turning point for Tommy and his theatre when he made Matunuck his home with the purchase of an historic home at 46 Antique Road. The property also included a small barn which he used for costume storage and later doubled in size as his collection grew.
In 1972, Tommy first put into words what would become two stock utterances, that all of his productions were "produced from scratch" and that all his people were "tops in their field."
1972 also marked the inauguration of the Junior Company or "JC's," fledgling actors and actresses hired for a teeny stipend and housing, who were given chorus roles, but who also were expected to work as techies, an experiment which lasted seven seasons with mixed results. By 1980 Tommy's productions had become too complex to trust to slave labor. The first batch of JC's included Susan DuVal's neice Laurie Harris who summered in the Bontecou compound on the beach behind the Theatre.
Tommy's seventh season recap in 1973 gives an idea of the frenetic pace of the place and of the life he had made for himself.
In 1974, Tommy sought contributions for a new roof, describing the capital improvements he had already set in place. Susan DuVal contributed generously toward his efforts. Tommy's TBTS was a "self-supporting theatre," a for-profit corporation and thus could not give tax deductions for gifts received. There was no Director of Development, no Director of Marketing. Employees frequently complained that Tommy was stingy, thrifty or just plain cheap, but the Theatre's checkbook was also his personal checkbook, and he alone understood the master plan.
In 1976, he allowed himself a longer column to review his first ten seasons. Tommy had safely exceeded the seven-season-record set by the Wolin-Schiff team,and he had accomplished what a dozen or more managers before him had attempted, that is to make TBTS an ongoing and profitable concern.
A 1977 Providence Journal photo essay was shot during the season opener Light Up the Sky. The 1933 "Piano board" continued in use for stage lighting control until two season later.
In 1979, another record was broken when Tommy's Man of La Mancha played, closed, then reopened for a total run of six weeks.
1979 also saw a much needed addition to the "lot" and environs, the Yellow House and its barns which were used for scenery storage.
By 1980, Tommy had set into motion the process whereby TBTS was granted Landmark status, made official on July 10th.
At the end of the 1980 season, Tommy made a decision without precedent when he "destroyed" his bloated mailing list and began afresh.
Tommy experienced an unnerving setback in 1981 with his failed foray into the New London, Connecticut Garde Theatre, underestimating the expenses of producing on a larger stage than Matunuck. He folded after a single production, a revival of that summer's Pirates of Penzance.
With an eye toward the future, in 1985 Tommy created a non-profit corporation for the purpose of refurbishing TBTS' aging physical plant.
The results of the Foundation's first years of operation were greatly encouraging to Tommy, as he began to mount a major capital campaign.
All of Tommy's plans and dreams came to an abrupt halt in June, 1987 when the Bontecou clan announced plans to terminate Tommy's lease in favor of Laurie Harris. Harris' patronizing suggestion that Tommy "will be offered a position" in her organization is all the more astonishing when one considers that without Tommy, her family would have demolished TBTS two decades before.
Tommy said Goodbye to Matunuck in the program book for his final production the 1988 42nd Street in a bittersweet column which noted the visit that summer of Abe Feder, who had designed the Theatre fifty-five years before.
The Warwick theatre did not materialize for reasons beyond Tommy's control, but Tommy was never one to sit still and wait for events to unfold.
In 1990, he finally produced a show in Boston, the original play First Night which did not run. His other activities included the selling off of his large costume collection; trips to Europe for pleasure and for researching a comprehensive family history which he published in 2008; and the assembly of a vast collection of TBTS archival material which he donated to the University of Rhode Island. Replacing aluminum siding with clapboard, the Yellow House he restored to its original condition and sold for $750,000. He traveled to New York regularly in his lifelong quest to "see everything," and to keep in contact with his family and friends. He held a TBTS reunion at City Center in 2000. He produced Love Letters to benefit the Catholic parish in nearby Wakefield, RI.
In 2003, Laurie Harris and her partners announced that they were closing TBTS after sixteens seasons, terming the Theatre "a joyous little anachronism" in a Providence Journal article. TBTS remained dark for three seasons during which Tommy worked behind the scenes to accomplish what Laurie seemed to have no knack for: finding a new owner.
In 2006, the man whom Laurie had put out to pasture eighteen years previous turned the trick by hooking up TBTS and producer Bill Hanney, shown here with Tommy in a 1985 photo.
In the year before his death, Arline Fleming wrote him a wonderful Valentine.
Tommy left us in 2011.
August 2014 (c) Bob Foreman