We Create

THT successfully partnered with the City of Worcester and the Downtown Worcester Business Improvement District (WBID) to present THT Rep’s professional production of Julius Caesar as our collective gift to the community. The performances were free and open to the public, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of hundreds of donors including: presenting sponsors Assumption University and Bay State Savings Bank; supporting sponsors Lundgren Honda of Auburn and Winn Development; contributing sponsors Bartholomew & Company, Bowditch Attorneys, Country Bank, Fallon Health and Miles Press/American Printing; along with individual sponsors Mary C. DeFeudis, Marianne Felice, MD, Drs. Ivan & Noreen Green, Lisa & Neil McDonough, Donald & Susan Pegg, Grace & Jack Roche and Veronica & Howard Wiseman.

The show marked the third and most ambitious COVID-friendly project from the newly minted THT Rep, coming after The Edgar Allan Poe Double Header and A Christmas Carol: Reimagined the previous season. Toga-clad audiences filled the common night after night, confirming that professional straight plays have an eager audience here in the “Heart of the Commonwealth.”

The Wisemans followed Livy Scanlon’s career from Boston and Cambridge and then began to explore the wonders of Worcester. At a recent event, Veronica Wiseman spoke to a gathering of THT Rep supporters and shared, “There’s something about Worcester when you’re walking down the streets, coming to see something in a venue like this one, or even just going to a restaurant. There’s a feeling of possibility and potential and freshness. We just really got caught up in the newness and wonderfulness of being here within the first few minutes.

“When the pandemic hit, as we’ve heard, there was a stop of everything at that point in Worcester. And then one day, THT Rep’s Artistic Director, Livy Scanlon, called me on the phone. I was out on our deck, sort of in a depressed mood thinking, ‘Gee, what’s going to happen to the world and all of us?’ And then she said, ‘What if we . . .’ That phrase just caught my heart and it started to beat. ‘What if we . . . did an outdoor production on City Hall Plaza so people wouldn’t be afraid to come out because it would be outdoors? And we could reinvigorate the city and we could bring people together,