Some Wednesdays, the most important room in Smyrna is one most of the town has never heard of.
It sits inside the Smyrna Opera House on West South Street, and on the third Wednesday of every month, late in the morning, it belongs to a crowd that doesn’t buy tickets to anything. They arrive in pairs. One of them is doing fine. The other one is the reason they’re both there — a husband whose memory isn’t what it was, a mother living with Alzheimer’s, a wife who needs looking after around the clock. And the one doing fine? That’s the one this room was really built for. The caregiver.
It’s called Musical Memories Café. Caregivers bring the person they care for, and for about ninety minutes the job changes hands. There’s a shared meal. There’s live professional music — the familiar kind, the songs from when everybody in the room was young. And there’s a room full of people who do not need a single thing explained to them, because they are living the exact same life you are.
Anybody who has done care work knows the arithmetic of it. The days are long, the sleep is short, and almost nobody ever asks how the caregiver is holding up. Music gets somewhere words can’t reach. A song a man hasn’t heard in forty years can bring back the man who loved it, clear as a bell, for three minutes at a time. You don’t need a study to know that’s true. You just need to watch it happen once.
And here’s the part Lorie Twenge — the Smyrna reader who’s become our Good News Lady — was right to flag when she tipped us off: it’s free. Completely free, meal included, backed by federal Administration for Community Living funds so the people doing the hardest unpaid work in this community don’t have to pay for ninety minutes of breathing room.
But the café is only one Wednesday a month, and it’s one small room in a building that has quietly become one of the best stories in this town — because what Lorie said next is the other half of this piece. “It is an amazing program,” she told us. “Brian Hill has taken the opera house to a whole new level.”
So let’s talk about the Opera House, and about Brian Hill.
The building went up in 1870. It was Smyrna’s town hall, with the show hall upstairs, in the years when an opera house was how a farming town announced it intended to be somebody. It fell quiet, the way those buildings do, and then the town brought it back — fully restored, reopened in March of 2003 as a community cultural arts center under the care of the nonprofit Smyrna-Clayton Heritage Association. The stage is the B. Stimson Carrow Auditorium. The bones were always good. What’s changed is what’s happening on them.
Look at the calendar. Tribute acts that sell — a Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton night this Saturday, a Bon Jovi tribute the week after. Summer camps for kids. The Delaware Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has made its home there. And the musicals came back. Matilda in 2025. Then, this past April, Cabaret — the first full musical the house had mounted in years, and not a safe one. BroadwayWorld’s reviewer didn’t grade on a curve. “The Smyrna Opera House’s Cabaret isn’t just good — it’s a minor miracle,” he wrote, calling it “a community theatre production that refuses to think small,” and closing with the line every small-town stage dreams about: “Smyrna Opera House didn’t just stage Cabaret. They proved they’re ready to matter.” This December they do Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, two weekends of it.
Somebody is steering that. His name is Brian Hill, and the best part of his story is that he didn’t arrive from some arts administration somewhere else. Delaware audiences were watching Brian Hill on that stage long before he was running the building — singing country on the Opera House’s Harvest Moon night back in 2012, playing the Gene Cook tribute in 2024 alongside half the working musicians in central Delaware. He’s one of their own who worked his way to the desk. Now he’s the Executive Director, with Artistic Director Lennon Heitz beside him and the Heritage Association board behind them, and the results are sitting right there on the calendar for anybody to read: bigger shows, braver shows, a hall of fame in the building, and on third Wednesdays, a free lunch and a room full of music for the people this town leans on hardest and thanks least.
Credit where credit is due — that’s the whole point of this piece, and the Good News Lady called it exactly right.
So here’s your part. Musical Memories Café runs every third Wednesday, 11:30 to 2:00, doors at 11, at the Smyrna Opera House, 7 West South Street. There’s one today. The next ones are November 18 and December 16. Registration is required for both the caregiver and the person they care for — call the Opera House at 302-653-4236. It’s open to adult caregivers looking after someone over 60, or someone of any age living with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia, and care recipients must live in Delaware.
If that’s you, go. You have earned ninety minutes. And if it’s not you, you know somebody it is — tell them. That’s half of what a hometown paper is for.
A hundred and fifty-six years after they raised the building, Smyrna’s opera house is not coasting on its history. It’s having its best years right now. Somebody should say so out loud.
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