Nightmare on Putnam Street to benefit Peoples Bank Theatre

If Halloween was a poker game, Brad and LeeAndra Smith would be the whales at the table.

They’re going all in.

The Smiths have held an annual Halloween party for a decade now, and last year moved it to Peoples Bank Theatre, where Brad is technical director. It just got too big to manage in their home.

“Last year, we had about a hundred people, and it was getting to be too much for the kind of thing you hold in your basement, so we decided to try out the theater,” he said Wednesday.

This year will be the first for which the event is widely advertised with tickets available to the general public. The proceeds will go to the nonprofit Hippodrome/Colony Historical Theatre Association, the group that spearheaded restoration of the Victorian theater and continues to maintain and operate it.

Smith said they expect about 200 or 300 people.

The couple’s enthusiasm for parties began in their former home in Arkansas, where people often held parties in their homes, he said. They moved to Marietta in 2003.

“We were astounded by how Marietta went after Halloween,” he said. “We started having the party in our basement, and it started out with six friends, and just kept growing as word got around. … it became an event that everybody looked forward to.”

When the renovated theater opened in 2015, he said, “it seemed like a natural setting.”

They tried it out last year for a limited number of people – about 100, which is how large the house party had become – and this year they’ve opened it wide for the general public.

The evening will include a cash bar, music and entertainment, and of course a costume contest.

“It’s a great time,” Smith said. “Even if you’ve been to the theater before, it will have a new look. You’ll come in the back, there will be colored lights, it’s all themed out. We have entertainment coming from Columbus, a magician, this is one time we’ve brought big city club acts to Marietta.”

Entertainers will be Frankster & Co. Party to Go as DJ, psychic Aeson Knight, caricatures by J.D. Williamson, the illusionist and magician Kaplan the Great, and live music by Sadie Johnson and Friends.

Smith and theater executive director Hunt Brawley were taking in the effect Wednesday afternoon. The stage has been walled off as a separate room, dominated at one end by a 10-foot animatronic smoke-belching dragon. Spiders and skeletons hang from the walls, a dismembered man who screams as people pass by is suspended upside down next to an electric panel that throws sparks, and a talking butler holds out a platter bearing a skull. Everything is illuminated with lurid red and blue lighting.

Smith said party goers will be able to circulate from the stage area, which will become a big dance floor once things get rolling, and go downstairs to what is normally the dressing room and the green room, both filled with surprises.

“We’re gonna spook it out a bit,” he said, looking around the basement rooms with a grin. The decor, he said, is made up of items he and LeeAndra have accumulated over years of party-throwing.

Theater marketing director Drew Tanner said he expects up to 300 tickets to be sold, with many of them walk-ups Saturday night.

“Costumes? Absolutely, there will be a contest. We just request no full face masks,” he said.

Tickets are available online at peoplesbanktheatre.com, $60 for individuals and $50 each for parties of two or more, and information also is available by calling the theater at 740-371-5152.

The party starts at 7 p.m. Saturday and goes until midnight.