New Canaan’s iconic 101-year-old movie theater, The Playhouse on Elm Street, is set to reopen to the public on Friday following a four-year closure. The completely renovated, twin-screen theater—brought back to life following an agreement with New Jersey-based CinemaLab to operate the town-owned building—is set for a special invite-only premiere Thursday night and then will open to the general public with Ryan Reynolds’s movie “If.”
The town Police Commission last week approved the theater’s operational plan to make a big splash of Thursday’s premiere. Represented by town resident Jayne Benton, the cupola-topped theater will see the Playhouse Lot out back closed in the early afternoon for guests of the premiere to gather for a red carpet entrance down the LPQ alley and into the building.
“All of our guests are going to enter down the alleyway down a red carpet, turn the corner and go in the front door,” Benton told members of the appointed body at their June 20 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “But we don’t need to block off the whole sidewalk. We have some stanchions that are going to go along there, as well, because we’d like to be able to have people walking in front of the Playhouse and kind of being a part of the whole thing.”
The whole thing has been a long time coming and eagerly anticipated by New Canaanites.
Closed at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and available to a new tenant since later that year, when Bow Tie Cinemas terminated its lease, the Playhouse originally was scheduled to reopen for its centennial (2023) but that date has been pushed back amid construction delays.
