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‘We Would Like To Exhaust the Opportunities in New Canaan’: Popular Summer Theatre Program Eyes More Traditional Venue

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When Ed and Melody Libonati launched Summer Theatre of New Canaan in 2004, they needed about 50 people, including local actors, to put on their live shows—Shakespeare in the restored walled garden at Waveny, and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” at Saxe Middle School. For the season featuring “Singin’ in the Rain” that closed last week, the longtime town residents required nearly 125 staff members and another 40-plus volunteers to put their performances at the tent in Waveny near the New Canaan High School parking lot. In order to continue its program and move toward a sustainable model, the nonprofit organization now must get to a point where it’s revenue from programming exceeds that which comes in through fundraising, according to Ed Libonati, STONC’s executive producer. “To get on a more sustainable trajectory for our organization, we need a large venue,” he told NewCanaanite.com recently when asked about the future of STONC in town. “We also need to amortize the cost of the people that we hire and we can do that by spreading out over a longer season, as well.”

The demand for STONC’s award-winning shows is there for that longer season, according to Libonati, and a more permanent, traditional facility would allow the organization to meet it.

Around Town

‘She Is Getting Every Ounce of Performance That These Actors Can Give’: Town Resident Ali Tesluk Makes Professional Directorial Debut with Summer Theatre of New Canaan

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Though she’d spent many years singing, dancing and acting—and in live theater programs familiar to New Canaanites, including at the Performing Arts Conservatory on Pine Street, St. Luke’s School Theatre and Summer Theatre of New Canaan—town resident Ali Tesluk came to directing unexpectedly, as a sort of fallback. It was 2014, her senior year in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in theater arts at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn. Tesluk had a directing class under her belt when went out for the acting part of a gypsy in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”—a part she didn’t get. “I went to the head of the Theater Department and I asked him for some feedback, and he pretty much said to me, ‘You were so great, you were so great, but the other girl who got the part, it was her turn,’ pretty much,” Tesluk recalled with a smile during an interview in downtown New Canaan on a recent morning, about two miles from the outdoor stage where she soon will make her professional directorial debut.

Around Town

Spotlight: The Story Behind Summer Theatre of New Canaan

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The sound of jump ropes cracking in succession echoes across the meadow where New Canaan High School meets Waveny. But this is no school fitness program—it’s group of seasoned actors from Connecticut and New York, practicing the choreography for the musical number “Whipped Into Shape” from the upcoming Summer Theatre of New Canaan performance of “Legally Blonde—the Musical.”

“It’s all really coming together,” Ed Libonati, executive director of STONC, said with a smile as he stands near the makeshift tent and stage that for 12 summers has transformed this bit of wilderness into a highly touted entertainment venue. Established by Ed and Melody Libonati, a New Canaan husband and wife who moved from New York 27 years ago and sought to bring a thriving performing arts scene to both the town and county, STONC is a nonprofit organization with a highly personal history for the family, and it’s become as integral a part of the summer scene as the water towers that loom over this landscape. Libonati, who holds many TV and theater directing credits, does not just work in theater but lives it—something his home life reflects. Melody herself has a number of Broadway credits to her name, including playing Sandra in the original company production of “Grease.” Their daughter, Allegra, is resident director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and son Christian, runs a theater company in Chicago.