Keely Baisden Knudsen and Eric Santagata outside the theater. Legacy Theatre Photo.
Before Eric Santagata ever worked on Broadway, he was a kid riding his bike around Stony Creek, getting lost in the stacks at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, and running the lights in the Stony Creek Puppet House. Decades later, he’s coming back to his old stomping grounds to run a young regional theater that is making its mark on the Shoreline.
Santagata, a Broadway veteran and champion of the performing arts who grew up in Branford, is returning to his roots this month, as the new artistic director at the Legacy Theatre in Branford. As he takes the creative helm, he is focused on growing community, building trust in the organization, and putting story at the center of the work that the theater does. He succeeds Executive Artistic Director Keely Baisden Knudsen, a co-founder of the theater.
His official first day is Monday, January 19. He inherits an already-programmed 2026 mainstage season, including Danny Goggins’ Nunsense, L. Frank Baum, Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s The Wizard of Oz, and Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Dates, tickets and more information on those shows are available here.
“It’s where I got so much of my start,” Santagata said in a phone call Friday morning. “This theater [the old Stony Creek Puppet House] was such a heartbeat for the Stony Creek area. I am excited to come back after having done a lot of different things.”
“I could not be more thrilled to pass the baton to Eric for what will assuredly be a fabulous new chapter in the Legacy’s book!” added Knudsen in a press release Thursday.
For Santagata, who currently lives in Redding with his husband, Roland Wolfe, and their chihuahua Otis, it’s a homecoming that has been years in the making. As a kid growing up in Branford, Santagata caught the theater bug early, first at Branford Intermediate School (now Francis Walsh Intermediate School) and later in productions at the Stony Creek Puppet House (also called the Macri-Weil Sicilian Theater).
At the time, “there was always something fun and theatrical happening,” from dinner theater at Amarante’s Sea Cliff to programs at Albertus Magnus and the Little Theatre in New Haven.
“It allowed me to be super creative,” he remembered, a smile audible at the edge of his voice. When Santagata was in middle school, he started coming to the Puppet House to help a cousin with a performance of short stories there. One day he walked into rehearsal, and something just clicked. “It was making clarity out of chaos,” he remembered.
By the time Santagata got to high school, he had fallen fully in love with theater, an interest nurtured by beloved Branford educators like Toni Cartisano and Cathyann Roding. Together, Santagata remembered, the two teachers were unstoppable, encouraging students as they dove into shows from Pippin and South Pacific to On The Town. For him, it seemed as though the dynamic duo could do anything—and even on a shoestring budget, they probably could.
“These fun roles are where you learn what your capabilities are,” said Santagata, who during those years played characters including Bobby Child in Ken Ludwig, Ira Gershwin, and George Gershwin’s Crazy for You and Gabey in On The Town. By the time he graduated, he knew that he wanted to pursue musical theater in college and professionally.
“It’s almost the only time that I knew it,” he added with a laugh. “Everything after that has led me in a bunch of different directions."
Even in moments of uncertainty, he held tight to that foundation he’d built in Branford. When Santagata left Connecticut, he attended the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), earning a BFA that became his professional launchpad to Broadway. After graduating, he learned how to wear multiple creative hats, sometimes all at once. Part of his gift was his flexibility on and off the stage, as adept at assistant or associate directing as he was at choreography and character development.
In 2006, just two years after graduating from college, he served as a dance captain for The Apple Tree, doing double duty as a swing. Soon, he was assistant directing The Scottsboro Boys and the revival of Falsettos, with stops at works like Chaplin and Bullets Over Broadway as well as stages at the Vineyard Theatre.
From 2020 through 2023, he served as an associate professor and the Patricia A. Corbett Distinguished Chair of Musical Theatre at his alma mater, CCM, where he helped students navigate the profession as it entered and then came slowly out of Covid-19. He watched the field morph before his eyes (as it continues to do today), becoming the kind of mentor that he once looked up to as a bright-eyed, fresh-faced teenager on the cusp of a career in the performing arts.
He never forgot his Connecticut roots. Since 2018, Santagana has held positions on the board of directors of the Broadway Method Academy (now formally called the Black Rock Theater), the Fairfield-based organization that runs the Sondheim Awards. When the Legacy Theatre first opened its doors, he returned for its 2022 Broadway concert series, performing a cabaret in June of that year. He returned to Branford to perform in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, at the Legacy Theatre last summer, during which he played Judge Turpin.
He also knows and loves Stony Creek, a champion of the area as much as he is of the theater. Long before architects ever restored the Puppet House, or broke ground on the renovation that has since birthed five joyful seasons, Santagata said his grandfather and great-grandfather owned a barber shop where a small cottage still stands at the corner of the property. His great-grandfather also operated a tavern just a stone’s throw away, now the home of Stony Creek Depot.
His parents still live in the house nearby where he grew up, too. As a kid, "I would come home and change my clothes and get on my bike, and I would be down in Stony Creek for hours and hours and hours,” he remembered. While high school was his door to the wider world of musical theater, it was those afternoons, many spent at the Puppet House, that taught him that theater was as much rite and ritual as it was an act of faith.
“I just remember watching that sort of teamwork, and the building of something that was greater than yourself,” he said. “And the way that it could move people.”
As he steps into the new leadership role, he’s holding onto that—and thinking about how he can nurture and grow community, one production and artistic collaborator at a time. While Knudsen has already mapped out the theater’s 2026 season, it’s on him to figure out “which of my creative director friends can I bring out, which of my choreographer friends … putting those pieces together and [also] discovering where the local talent is” going forward.
In addition, he wants to see “how it [the theater] can function in a way that is a valued resource, a trusted resource,” he said. For him, the best theater doesn’t specifically come from robust production budgets or casts with instant name recognition. It comes from a creative team that understands the value and power of narrative.
“If the storytelling is good, it doesn’t matter if we’re using a gold gilded flute or a stick off the tree,” he said with a laugh. “It’s just creating magic.”
That’s in step with the evolving vision of the Legacy Theatre itself, a still-young stage and conservatory that sits where the Puppet House once made dreams take flight. Since the Legacy opened its doors in April 2021, working with Wyeth Architects to create a full-scale renovation and expansion of the original building, Knudsen has continued to innovate, with community partnerships, new educational programming, and world-premiere performances like Joseph J. Simeone’s Love Affair and her own adaptation of R. William Bennett’s book Jacob T. Marley last year.
Legacy Theatre Co-Founder Stephanie Stiefel Williams, now president of the organization’s Board of Trustees, echoed the enthusiasm that both Santagata and Knudsen brought to the news of the transition.
“We are thrilled that Eric has agreed to take the helm as Legacy’s new Artistic Director!” she said in a press release sent out last Thursday. “He possesses an incredibly impressive pedigree in theatre as a performer, educator, and an administrator. We are so lucky to have him return to his Stony Creek roots to help us continue the theatre’s mission."