Opening Night

There are few left who remember opening night at the Juliet Theater on January 6, 1938, but according to a 2004 article by Annon Adams in Marquee, the journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America, then Vassar president Henry Noble “Prexy” MacCracken was the main speaker at the event.

The owners also had invited Prexy, an English literature scholar, to choose the theater’s name. The October 2, 1937, edition of The Miscellany News reported that he initially had suggested “Portia,” “after the only Shakespearian woman with what amounted to a college education.” The moniker was in a similar vein as other Shakespeare-related names given to the local Bardavon and Stratford theaters owned by the same company. But something quickly changed, and a week later the student newspaper reported—with mixed feelings—that “Juliet” had replaced “Portia.”

As Adams wrote in her piece, a Poughkeepsie Eagle-News article appearing the day after the opening said Prexy was hopeful the theater would offer pedagogical benefits. The president, the paper reported, “described motion pictures as a great new educational implement, declaring that it was regrettable that it has received such little encouragement from the field of education itself.” (He needn’t have worried.)

The Eagle-News reported that the event was quite a swanky affair: “The opening had something of the impressiveness of a metropolitan opening night, as a good share of the 500 guests arrived in formal dress.”

Tovarich, starring Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer, was the featured film.

But there was one complaint, Adams wrote: “The theatre seated 579 people on one level. A local wag suggested that every Juliet needed a balcony, but this one didn’t have one.”

Nevertheless, the Juliet Theater went on to live in the memories of generations of students who found escape from their stressful lives watching films in the darkness of this Arlington icon.