Days before the 20th anniversary of the New Year’s Day fire that destroyed the New England Marionette Opera, theater founder and general director Ted Leach said he has donated the last remains of his collection – saved from the fire – to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
“I wanted them to be in a really good place,” Leach said Friday. “It’s sort of like the Smithsonian of puppetry. I thought this was a great place to basically unload everything.”
Everything includes five marionettes – three from Porgy and Bess, Escamillo from Carmen, and one of the witches from Macbeth – as well as various items from the theater – playbills from both home and touring locations, photos of personnel and productions, numerous news clippings and reviews, and even a short note from George Gershwin’s nephew praising the Porgy and Bess production that the theatre mounted. The marionettes and artifacts had been lovingly saved by Leach, but were essentially just sitting in boxes in his home, he said. Following the Jan. 1, 1999, fire that destroyed the building and most of its 435 marionettes, some marionettes ended up at the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, a few went to former New England Marionette Opera marionettes manipulators, who briefly ran a small marionette theater in the region and one remains in Peterborough.
“There is only one marionette in Peterborough that exists now. It is at the Mariposa Museum and that’s Madame Butterfly,” Leach said.
The Mariposa Museum building was built from what was left of the New England Marionette Opera building after the fire.“So she’s on display there, in a plastic case, about 20 feet from where she used to perform.”
Though Leach loved the New England Marionette Opera and grieves its loss to this day, he made the tough decision in Nov. of 1999 to not attempt to restart it.
“It was a big deal and there were so many people in Peterborough that were involved with the theater,” Leach said. “They were all local people, although the audience was primarily out-of-state. Not out-of-town, out-of-state, huge numbers, 96 percent of the audience were from out-of-state.”
Resurrecting the marionette opera company was just too much for Leach to take on, he said. The marionettes were valued at $1,000 to $1,500 a piece. And had been “exquisitely” created over the years by company members. Started in May of 1992, the New Year’s Day fire had gutted the building, which was also the former home of the Monadnock Ledger, the newspaper Leach bought in 1979.
In those six years Leach had turned the company into America’s largest marionette opera company. It had two performing companies and plans to be a resident company of one of the largest theatre’s in Boston in addition to maintaining its Peterborough home. According to Leach, “Within 22 minutes, the fire wormed its way through the 156-yr. old structure, and nine complete opera productions and close to 235 marionettes were gone. The fire inside the structure was so hot, that telephones, control boards and monitors inside the control booth in the balcony at the rear of the theatre took on the appearance of props for a Dali painting as they melted and fused although the flames never reach the actual booth.”
Leach said he wanted to ensure the remaining marionettes and artifacts were preserved in perpetuity. The Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta will not be ready to display the marionettes and artifacts till spring since the marionettes still need repairs from the fire, Leach said.