Brooklyn Heights mourns Jane Stanton, Heights Players founder
Children’s Theater Director Dies at 96
Brooklyn lost a leading figure in children’s theater creation and management recently when longtime Brooklyn Heights resident Jane Strahan Stanton passed away on Dec. 31, 2015. In recent years, she was living with her family in Mendocino, California.
An accomplished theatrical director and children’s theater pioneer who brought the joy of live productions to many children for the first time during a 65-year career, Stanton was a former resident of Brooklyn Heights. She was the director (and founder with Heights resident Sally Forbes) of the Penny Bridge Players Theatre for Children, performing in the undercroft of Church of the Assumption, as well as in the St. Felix Street Playhouse at Brooklyn Academy of Music. She also was a producer and the director of Young World Productions, created together with former Heights resident Sally Weeks Congdon, which rotated performances between three locations in Manhattan.
Stanton was the author of more than 16 imaginative plays for children, performed at the Heights Players and on many other theatrical stages on the East Coast, with music composed by Andrea Stryker-Rodda and Lewis Hardee. Among her better known plays are “The Prince with Blue Hair” and “Tinker Tom and the Magical Grannies.”
“Creating live theater for children is a labor of love, and being witness to the pure joy of kids who have never seen live theater before is absolute magic,” Stanton said in one newspaper account.