A Curtain Call for the Hyde Park Playhouse

by Bob Sommer, May 27, 2008

An old playbill from the Hyde Park Playhouse features the grainy and bejeweled image of Marjorie Gateson on the front cover, then appearing in “Pride and Joy,” a “new play” by John O’Hare. Gateson’s was a recognizable face to audiences in 1954, the playbill’s date. Her career began in 1931 and included over 100 films. Often cast in matronly supporting roles in movies like Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and The Sky’s the Limit (1943), she appeared with Mae West, Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Haviland, Fred Astaire, and many other big stars. By the early `50s, her prime film years were behind her, but she had revitalized her career in TV soap operas and was still certain to draw patrons to the Playhouse. Sprinkled throughout the black and white playbill are ads for businesses in Hyde Park—Arbuckle’s Tavern (“Where Friends Meet After the Show”), the Hyde Park Diner (“Just Good Food”—and air-conditioning!), and W. Crispell & Sons, where you could buy “Reynolds Do-It-Yourself Aluminum.”

Summer stock at the playhouse was a presence in the cultural life of the Hudson Valley for over three decades, until April 28, 1987, when the theater burned down in a conflagration of unknown cause that brought fire companies from across the region. Owners and producers came and went in those years, and by the late 1970s, the theater had fallen into disuse until actor Biff McGuire bought and revived it as The Hyde Park Festival Theater. The property’s current owner, Patricia Graf, had just purchased the Playhouse when fire destroyed it. She only saw one play there, Berthold Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man,” in 1986, with Bill Murray and Stockard Channing, but she lives on the grounds now. At the center of the courtyard, the stone base of the once-familiar clock tower now resembles a massive, ivy-covered tree stump, while behind it the lawn gives way to woods where the theater once stood.

Like Marjorie Gateson, the Playhouse has faded into history.