Broadway meets small-town charm: Peterborough Diner welcomes Hollywood A-listers for special visit

Less than a month after Melanie Neily bought the Peterborough Diner, she got an unexpected phone call—some Hollywood’s biggest celebrities wanted to come have lunch.

“It’s been a whirlwind! ” Neily said.

The cast of “Our Town” paid a visit to her diner and the small New Hampshire town on Aug. 27, ahead of the show’s return to Broadway for the first time in more than 20 years.

The cast boarded two buses from New York City in the morning and spent the day in Peterborough, starting with an early lunch at the diner, then a tour of the town, and ending with a table read at the MacDowell.

Thornton Wilder wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play in Peterborough. It follows neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship turns into romance and then marriage. Peterborough is said to be the place that inspired the small fictional town where the play takes place called Grover’s Corners.

Neily closed her diner to accommodate the cast and crew, which included Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Zoey Deutch, Ephraim Sykes, Billy Eugene Jones, Richard Thomas, Michelle Wilson, and director Kenny Leon.

“They were so gracious, so excited,” Neily said. “They were so, so kind.”

The producers reached out to her two months prior and they emailed back and forth to prepare the menu. Neily didn’t tell her staff that they were coming until that week.

“We kept it on the down low for the staff because we didn’t want crazy mayhem,” she said.  

They closed down that morning at 10:30 to have time to prepare. Neily’s sisters from Connecticut drove up to help and they got to work making buffalo chicken wraps, vegan bread pudding, and blueberry crisp.

“We cleared our counters and we did our Reubens, our tuna melts. We cut everything in half so they could have as much as they wanted,” Neily said. 

The cast came as the Peterborough Diner is celebrating its 75th anniversary. This historic spot operates out of an original Worcester train-style lunch car, one of only about 1,000 ever made by the Worcester Lunch Car Company in the mid-1950s. Each car was given a unique number and color combination. The Peterborough Diner is said to be Worcester Lunch Car No. 827— the first-ever made with a green-and-cream color scheme.

Neily bought the diner after she lost her job in marketing and moved to Peterborough from Litchfield a year ago. The diner was for sale, and as she was trying to figure out her next step, opening her own business just made sense.She officially took ownership in June. 

“I want to serve people, I want to listen,” she said, explaining she relies on her staff to show her the ropes.  

Her staff posed for pictures with the cast in front of the diner before Gus Kaikkonen, a former Broadway actor and artistic director of the Peterborough Players of 25 years, took the cast and crew on a tour of the town. 

Wilder, who died in 1975, was hesitant to confirm that Peterborough is Grover’s Corners, but there are signs—a similar drugstore, a church, a school, a similar graveyard, and similar streets. 

Though much of Peterborough was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane— the same year Wilder finished the play—the important spots depicted in the play are still visible. Kaikkonen showed them the location of the former drug store and where the milk man lived.

The cast lastly visited MacDowell, a nonprofit artists’ retreat in Peterborough set on over 1,000 acres of picturesque farmland, where Wilder finished the play.  MacDowell has hosted many renowned artists, with works like Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” being written there. The actors posed in front of Veltin, the studio where Wilder worked, before gathering at Bond Hall to read the play together for the first time.

Kaikkonen has worked on the play himself about six times, and it’s one of the first plays he was ever in as a kid. 

“What Wilder is asking people to do, and, and you experience it in the play, is to appreciate your life moment-by-moment, to actually stop and see that you’re alive, instead of just going blindly through life trying to cope with this problem and that problem,” he said.

Previews of “Our Town” begin Tuesday, Sept. 17. Opening night is Thursday, Oct. 10 at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City.