For almost a century, the Cape Playhouse has been a jewel of summer stock—a white-shingled beacon of Broadway-caliber performances tucked away in the picture-perfect Dennis, Massachusetts. Now under the artistic leadership of Eric Rosen, a seasoned director and producer with a packed resume that includes running Kansas City Rep and Chicago’s About Face Theatre, the Cape Playhouse is entering an era of reinvention, just in time for its 100th anniversary in 2027.
In this conversation, Rosen reflects on what it’s like to run a theater with such a compressed season, how the company is delicately balancing audience-pleasing shows like Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story with new fare that includes a Joan Rivers bio-play, and working against the clock and the seasons to pack in as many viewers as possible.
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This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Cape Playhouse has always had this idyllic aura in my mind even though I’ve never been there.
If New England conjured up the platonic ideal of a theater, it would be this. It’s so charming, and the history is so cool. This is different than anything I’ve ever done, in terms of having a very long break between seasons, and then having an incredibly intense four-month run in a place where everyone else is on vacation.
As a long time artistic director of year-round theaters, what is it like to run a venue where the whole season is concentrated into such a short period of time?
It couldn’t be more different, both in terms of the rhythm of the work and the purpose of the work. There’s a clock that begins when the weather turns warm and ends when it gets cold. That’s as much time as there is.
The other difference is that everyone here is on vacation. When I have directed shows in Los Angeles, everyone’s mad because they’ve fought traffic for an hour and a half. In New York, it’s also feeling like everyone raced to get there, and they’re in five other universes. Everyone here just wants to have a beautiful experience. The audiences are kind and enthusiastic and open.
On the one hand, it’s much more intense in terms of schedule, but on the other hand, there’s a kind of a happiness about it that, at this stage in my life, I can really appreciate. All the skills that I had from producing and artistic directing for the previous 20 years come to bear, although the vibe and the demand is very different.
How do you plan a season with all of that in mind?
The musical-theater component of what we do is not very different than what I did in Kansas City or other places. We’re trying to create shows that will attract a large enough audience to justify the expense of a 20-person cast. We’re doing four musicals and a play, and we looked for shows that will fill the place to capacity in this short window of time that we have.
It’s a larger canvas than I would have thought, and I’m trying to not be self-limiting on what I think we can do. But I can’t do a brand-new play that no one’s ever heard of. It’s not what this theater is for. We have 540 seats and four months to fill them, and I have to choose shows in which the audience will come along with me.
The thing that’s surprising me, though, is that that doesn’t mean easy shows. We started the year with Buddy Holly, which is easy and the audience loved it, and then it was matched by the audience numbers and response to a very youthful, edgy production of Rent with a mostly queer, young cast. I was expecting it to do ok, and you could not get a ticket. It was an audience we hadn’t seen before.
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Take me through the rest of the season, starting with Anastasia, which you’re remounting after staging it at Bucks County Playhouse.
I had seen it on Broadway, and I liked it, but I didn’t have a particularly strong feeling about it. As I was reading it, I was like “Oh, wait, there’s something here.” I had this idea to strip it down to almost nothing and get at the core emotional fable in the story. It’s beautiful, dark, and strange, and you can really see how the folks who wrote Ragtime wrote it. It’s about identity shaped by nations in conflict, and how the geopolitical shapes the romantic lives of these characters.
At Bucks, it became one of my favorite things I’ve ever directed. To get to bring that team back together with a healthy break and some new people in the cast feels thrilling. We have a little more time to think deeply about it. The performances are richer, our understanding of the story is clearer, and the heart of the show is very much alive, which isn’t always true with a reboot. This one is very special.
Kelly Devine, who choreographed Come From Away on Broadway, is now directing a new production here. I’m curious to see how she used her original ideas to create something all new.
Kelly’s approach to it gleans all the wisdom she has from having made it originally. The life of it will be a continuation of her journey with the story, but the physical production is very different. The set is not the same at all. But there are a lot of people who’ve done Come From Away before in it. Pearl Sun is doing it, Joel Hatch is coming out of retirement to do it, which is super fun. It will feel like a reunion cast, and I think that will bring a lot of joy to the experience.
Is the Joan Rivers bio play the same production that’s coming to Barrington Stage in August?
No, it’s a whole new production. Tye Blue, who directed Titanique, is directing, and it’s a different cast, different everything. The commercial producers who are developing it were very interested in the idea of getting to see it from a different perspective. We’re working very closely with them, especially Danny Goldstein, who has written a very beautiful, very elegant play.
The dramatic arc is very strong, and the theatricality of it is very interesting. One actress plays young Joan Rivers in the first act, and then Melissa Rivers in the second act, and an older actress plays Joan’s mother in the first act and then Joan in the second. What makes it special is that everything Joan ever said and wrote was made available to Danny. He had access to her entire catalog of jokes. You couldn’t make that stuff up. You couldn’t do her without it.
Are you enjoying yourself?
There are days where I drop my son off at this idyllic New England summer camp and then I walk to the beach and stare at the oyster beds and I think “Wow, this is a very blessed experience.”
This place has had good times and bad, but it had a really tough period before I got here. In such a quick, invigorated way, it has come back to life. The budget has more than doubled in a year-and-a-half. The staff has tripled. The audience has more than doubled. It’s caught fire in a way that I’m surprised by. And I can’t exactly say why. What I’m doing isn’t that different than what was done before.
I think the special ingredient is the Broadway factor. We’ve always said, this is where Broadway goes to summer. Us and Ogunquit are the two holdouts, the last of those theaters to still do this model. And to be honest, I’m kind of copying Ogunquit’s business plan, if not their aesthetic approach. We are both in remote locations that are very cold eight months of the year, so if it’s going to succeed, it has to succeed in this model. And we’ve really shown that it can work.
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