The Newport Playhouse & Cabaret Restaurant will close on Dec. 31 after 43 years, president Jonathan Perry announced Tuesday in a letter to patrons posted on the theater’s Facebook page.
The Playhouse will continue performing through the end of the year. “We still have several months of performances ahead of us, audiences to entertain, stories to tell and laughter to fill this building,” Perry wrote, asking longtime patrons to come back for a show during the final months.
Perry was 18 when the theater opened in August 1983, thinking a small theater “might be a fun hobby until I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up.” It became, he wrote, virtually his entire adult life.
He worked alongside his father, Matt Siravo, for 32 years. Siravo served as performer, director, producer and mentor at the Playhouse. “I can still hear his voice guiding me today,” Perry wrote. “His spirit will forever be part of this place.”
Perry described welcoming five children during those years and holding each of them on the stage to introduce them to the Playhouse family. Over four decades the theater built hundreds of sets, staged thousands of performances, wrote thousands of cabaret skits and, as Perry put it, probably rolled millions of meatballs.
What he said he’ll remember is the people — actors who found a home on the stage, employees who became family, and generations of guests who returned with children and grandchildren. The theater weathered floods, equipment failures, renovations and the pandemic.
“For more than four decades, people walked through our doors, shared a meal, laughed together and left feeling a little better than when they arrived,” Perry wrote. “Very few small theaters get to tell a story that lasts more than four decades. We did.”
