The show didn’t go on, but the theater company has. In the spring, Essex Community Players canceled its 2025-26 season finale, The Rocky Horror Show, after members of the crew received anonymous threats. Scrapping the beloved musical comedy cost the all-volunteer nonprofit $5,800 and sparked a storm of speculation as the theater company became the unwitting star of a real-life whodunit.
Four of its nine board members resigned amid the turmoil, which attracted national attention. Months later, area actors and crew members questioned whether they should be involved with the Players. One who had been with the company for 15 years severed ties.
Beth Wilbur jumped into the fray. The longtime set designer, who served on the board some 10 years ago, wasn’t involved with Rocky Horror, but she observed how those who had been were “deeply impacted by its outcome,” she wrote in an email. “The impact I felt was a need to step in and make things better — classic middle child!”
Elected board president in July, Wilbur sees a bright future for the 68-year-old community theater. Collectively, current board members possess the variety of skills theater administrators need, she said, and the “determination to launch a stellar new season.”
It opens on Friday, October 16, with Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, a new show from Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, the writing team behind Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. Their 90-minute romp riffs on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous novel “and all of Russian literature,” they say on their website. Audience members don’t have to know Crime and Punishment to enjoy the show, director Nan Murat said. Greenberg and Rosen didn’t even read it, she noted: “They read the CliffsNotes version and then wrote the play.”
Five actors play 50 characters. At a recent rehearsal, action moved quickly as veteran performers Roya Millard, Lauren MacKechnie and Clara Kuhn slipped in and out of various accents, employing props and accessories — a babushka and cigarette, a newsboy cap, shot glasses — as they switched personae.
Murat and stage manager Helen Jurnak, seated behind a folding table in Essex’s historic Memorial Hall, read the lines of the two missing cast members — Sarah Storjohann and Stephen Moore — and supplied sound effects: Bong, bong, bong. Whoosh. Typewriter, typewriter, typewriter. Confidence, competence and camaraderie prevailed. That in itself was a welcome scene, given the way the prior season ended.
While anonymous threats ultimately forced The Rocky Horror Show’s cancellation, a confluence of more mundane factors contributed to the show’s demise, according to longtime Players actor and director Adam Cunningham, who was on the board then and is now vice president.
Neither Rocky Horror director Patrick Cope nor producer Jane Healy had put on a musical before. Their inexperience resulted in miscalculations in managing time and money, Cope told Seven Days in April. He and Healy did not reply to requests to comment for this article.
Rehearsals lacked momentum, and Cunningham faults the board for not paying closer attention. A month before opening night, the company learned that Cope’s decision to make the male Rocky character a woman violated the show’s licensing agreement, forcing actors to scramble.
Then the threats arrived. The first text, sent to music director Kenny Grenier and a board member, came from someone claiming to represent the licensing agency and threatened to revoke the Players’ rights to the show. Another text said: “Patrick and Kenny need to be gone.” The most ominous: “Oh just you wait for rehearsal tonight. It’s coming and you deserve it.” That’s when the Players canceled the show.
Essex Police announced in August that the threats had come from Grenier himself, a revelation that landed in a segment on the comedic NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” The dummy phone numbers Grenier used to send the texts were tied to an IP address registered to his home, police said. The music director confessed to sending the texts as a way “to step away from the production for alleged personal safety issues instead of the true reason of what he described as difficulties with the cast and crew,” police reported.
He was cited for sending false reports to law enforcement, a misdemeanor, and the case was referred to the Chittenden County Community Justice Center for resolution. Grenier, who can avoid prosecution if he completes the community justice program, did not reply to an email from Seven Days. Police said last week that they had nothing new to report on his case.
Prior to police solving the case, Murat and Millard had proposed Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, which Broadway World called “fast, fluid, and fun,” as this season’s opener. But amid the firestorm this summer, both had reservations about going through with it.
Vermont’s theater community is small. Murat, who began directing with the Players 16 years ago, feared continued association with the company could harm her reputation, especially following allegations on social media that bigotry played a role in canceling Rocky Horror. The cult classic celebrates sexual liberation, queer identity and raucous fun, and its Essex cast members were female, trans and/or nonbinary. “I just wanted to make sure all the goodwill I have built up as a director would not be tarnished,” Murat said.
Millard, a transgender man, had other concerns. He does not believe that the company discriminates against queer people, he said. In his first show there, in 2015, he played Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, “and at the time, I was a butch lesbian, engaged to a woman,” he said. In his next show he played a man. In real life, he’d started using male pronouns and asked his theater colleagues to refer to him using he/him. “And to a person, every member of that board, who had then known me for two years using she/her pronouns, tried their damnedest,” he said, adding that the company went out of its way to invite him back for this season.
The bigotry charge “doesn’t hold water,” Millard went on, but it has reverberated. When Crime and Punishment auditions were posted, he said, actors asked, “If I audition, will I get blacklisted?”
Millard’s primary worry was the board’s ability to support the production. He wanted to hear its version of the Rocky Horror saga. He and Murat discussed the issues with Cunningham and another board member before going forward with the new show. “Everything I was told made me feel comfortable going back in,” Murat said. “Roya and I were both saying we feel like we’ve come home.”
The board has learned from the incident and recalibrated, according to Cunningham: “We’ve taken those lessons to heart.”
Going forward, he said, board members will read licensing contracts carefully, improve communication and planning, and ensure that they more closely monitor the progress of the company’s shows to identify problems earlier. Still, not all former members of the Players are convinced.
“There would need to be some very major changes for me to even consider going back,” said actor Thalie Stapleton, a 15-year Players veteran who stage managed Rocky Horror. Stapleton, who resigned from the board in April after a short stint, “grew up in Memorial Hall,” they said, and had found mentors and a second family there. But they had become disenchanted even before the Rocky Horror collapse.
“Ultimately, from experiences I had in the last few shows I did and my experiences in the board meetings, I realized that my values no longer aligned with the values of Essex Players,” Stapleton said.
Stapleton alleged that nonbinary and neurodiverse actors have received unfriendly treatment and that the board prioritized finances over the well-being of its cast during a production last year.
One actor’s parent had recently died, and several actors were “chronically ill” during the run of Daddy’s Girl, Stapleton said. Cast members asked that one performance be canceled to give them a night off, Stapleton said, but director Don MacKechnie, also a board member, refused, even though only a handful of tickets had sold.
Board treasurer MacKechnie said in an email that the request to cancel the play’s penultimate performance on October 31 did not come from the actor whose parent had died.
Tickets sales had started soft, he acknowledged, but they picked up, and by showtime, the house was half full. The cast had three days off prior to that performance and one virtual rehearsal to run lines, MacKechnie said.
“I personally and we as a company DO care about the wellbeing of our cast and crew members and have gone to extreme lengths at times to support them during our productions,” his email said. “In the end though, ECP is a business, we advertised that there was going to be a performance that evening and the actors knew that going into auditions.”
Wilbur and MacKechnie said they and other board members are committed to moving forward. “We have some great ideas in the works that I hope we can roll out in 27-28,” Wilbur said in an email. Those include establishing a patron donor program; investing in software to streamline operations and cut costs; improving marketing; and recruiting more volunteers, starting with teens.
But first, the curtain will rise on a new season. Crime and Punishment runs through October 31. The season continues in December with the premiere of Trap Day, a drama set in a lobstering village off the coast of Maine, by Burlington playwright Lesley Becker. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the popular mystery adapted by Ken Ludwig, completes the lineup in the spring.
This time, all parties involved hope, the whodunit remains onstage. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Rocky’ Rebound | Essex Community Players returns from real-life drama”
This article appears in October 14 • 2026.
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