South Shore Music Circus

Despite its population of only around 25,000, Newport, Rhode Island is known for the gigantic role it’s played on the regional, national and international music scenes by hosting the Newport Jazz Festival and the Newport Folk Festival, the former since 1954 and the latter since 1959. But an even smaller coastal community about 55 miles north of Newport – Cohasset, Massachusetts – is home to a venue that’s been a major part of the area’s acoustical fabric since 1951: South Shore Music Circus. While it hasn’t achieved the global recognition of the two Ocean State festivals, it’s among the Bay State’s most popular live-music spots and has presented everything from operas, operettas, musicals and symphonies to jazz, fusion, folk, blues, country, rock and pop during its June-to-September season.

Relatively close to New England’s three biggest cities (27 miles from Boston, 34 from Providence and 60 from Worcester), SSMC is one of only two continuously operated in-the-round tent theatres in the United States, the other being Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis (about 55 miles from Cohasset). Its bucolic setting, intimate atmosphere, 360-degree rotating stage and ability to draw hundreds of household names over the years has made the 2,300-capacity space a summer staple for untold thousands, and while several Hollywood films have been shot in Cohasset, among them The Witches of Eastwick, Housesitter, The Finest Hours, Thoroughbreds and Confess, Fletch, SSMC put the town of about 8.400 residents on the map for the vast majority of music lovers.

BACKGROUND, SOUTH SHORE PLAYERS, MELODY TENT CONNECTION

Cohasset’s modern theatre history starts in 1932, when producer Raymond Moore, founder of The Cape Playhouse in Dennis, was looking for another site at which he could stage shows and chose Cohasset Town Hall, built in 1858. A number of major stars had appeared at The Cape Playhouse including Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart, Shirly Booth and Robert Montgomery, and several took the stage at Town Hall in ‘32, including Bogart, Josephine Hull and Van Heflin. In 1933, Newburyport, Massachusetts native Alexander Dean took over as the manager of the operation, officially known as South Shore Playhouse Associates, and formed the 55-member South Shore Players as its official troupe; over the next 18 years, the company hosted a variety of noted writers, orators and actors, among them Edward Everett Horton, Sinclair Lewis, Arthur Treacher, Sylvia Sydney and Thornton Wilder.

By the start of 1950, the South Shore Players were attracting far larger crowds than the town hall could accommodate, so Dean began the search for a new venue. Coincidentally, Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence and her husband Richard Aldrich, a Broadway producer who owned The Cape Playhouse and the Falmouth Playhouse at the time, were in the process of establishing Cape Cod Music Circus (now Cape Cod Melody Tent) and invited South Shore Playhouse Associates to cooperate in the venture. Dean turned down the offer, however, saying that tented theatre didn’t coincide with the type of future projects he’d envisioned. As a result, Lawrence and Aldrich opened their venue in Hyannis instead of in Cohasset, launching an extremely successful first season on July 4, 1950.

In December 1950, just three months after the end of Cape Cod Music Circus’s inaugural season, South Shore Playhouse Associates changed its tune on tent theatres, announcing that it would start presenting operas, operettas and other musical productions under a tent on the horse grounds of the Bancroft Estate in Cohasset in mid-1951, with Aldrich working as producer and director at the new venue, South Shore Music Circus. The then 1,000-capacity space became the second tent theatre in New England and the fourth in the US (after Lambertville Music Circus in New Jersey, Miami Music Circus in Florida and Cape Cod Music Circus). The close-knit relationship between Cape Cod Melody Tent and South Shore Music Circus continued through the decades, and South Shore Playhouse Associates officially acquired the Tent in March 1990.

Before the start of SSMC’s first season, a number of changes had to be made to the 9.2-acre Bancroft Estate (then owned by Jane Barron, stepdaughter of Barron’s magazine founder Clarance Barron), including removal of the horse stalls and old structure being replace by new ones. Reminders of the original grounds remain today, most notably a grassy area in the parking lot that was once part of the Bancroft’s horse ring and has been maintained as a tribute to SSMC’s humble roots.

OPENING, NOTABLE 1950S, ‘60S, ‘70S, ‘80S APPEARANCES

SSMC opened on June 25, 1951 with a performance of “Show Boat,” featuring a cast of over 60. Attendees included “important society, political and famous personages” dressed in “toppers, capes, stoles and furs,” according to The Patriot Ledger, and former Massachusetts Governor and Boston Mayor James M. Curley was in the audience. Because of the space constraints, none of the productions included elaborate scenery, but there were lots of lavish costumes and a nine-piece in-house orchestra. Tickets for the first season were the same as those at Cape Cod Music Circus: between$1.20 and $3.60 for evening shows and between $1.20 and $3.00 for the Thursday matinee.

During the rest of the ‘50s, SSMC hosted an impressive array of top comedians, actors and film stars including Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Bob Hope, Angela Lansbury, Zero Mostel, Pearl Baily, Robert Merrill, Rosemary Clooney, Victor Borge, Kitty Carlisle and George Burns. Among the jazz orchestras that took the stage were ones led by Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman and Benny Goodman. In the late ‘60s, when theater and opera became more elaborate and expensive, SSMC became mainly a concert space, as it remains today, and it hosted a multigenred array of artists in the early ‘70s including Paul Anka, The Byrds, The Clancy Brothers and The Cowsills. In the mid-to-late ‘70s, when the original canvas chairs were replaced with more comfortable stadium seats, acts included Burt Bacharach, Harry Chapin, Tony Bennett, The Kingston Trio, Tom Jones, Tony Orlando & Dawn, Johnny Cash, Sha Na Na and Arlo Guthrie.

The first half of the ‘80s included shows by a who’s who of pop and folk, from Dionne Warwick, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, The Temptations, Air Supply and The Pointer Sisters to Pete Seeger, Don McLean, Peter, Paul and Mary, Tom Rush and Joan Baez. Others who appeared included Mel Tormé, Robert Flack, Glen Campbell and Gladys Knight & The Pips. Among those who took the stage in the second half of the decade were rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Chuck Berry, Fats Domino Jerry Lee Lewis, Chubby Checker and Roy Orbison:, trad-pop singers Wayne Newton and Engelbert Humperdink: jazz greats Stan Getz and Buddy Rich; and others as diverse as Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, The Everly Brothers, Chaka Khan and Survivor.

NOTABLE 1990S, 2000S APPEARANCES

In the ‘90s, acts ranged from pop legend Diana Ross and disco kings K.C. & The Sunshine Band to country star Randy Travis, bluesman Buddy Guy and The Kinks. Others included Little Richard, John Denver, The Righteous Brothers, Liza Minelli, Julio Iglesias and Boz Scaggs. SSMC has continued presenting acts from across the musical spectrum in the 21st century, among them Aretha Franklin, Cyndi Lauper, Joe Cocker, Carole King, The Doobie Brothers, The B-52’s, The Beach Boys, Susan Tedeschi and B.B. King. Since 2020, the ever-impressive roster has included George Thorogood, Little Feat, Jay & The Americans, Foreigner, The Turtles and Grace Potter.

In the 30 years after the first “music circus” in Lambertville, New Jersey closed in 1970, every other tented live-music venue in the US shuttered except SSMC, Cape Cod Melody Tent and Broadway At Music Circus in Sacramento, the last of which closed in 2002, replaced by Wells Fargo Pavillion. In July 2011, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of SSMC’s opening, the Cohasset Historical Society held a special exhibition that featured playbills, rare photographs, other assorted artifacts and personal recollections from people who’d been attending performances under its tent every season for years, and in many cases decades.

(by D.S. Monahan)