Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, has for years talked about building a larger, state-of-the-art facility to complement his Victorian candy box of a theater in the town of East Haddam. Now the company is planning not just for a new theater but for the literal transformation of the town, with theaters, new retail space for galleries, restaurants and specialty shops, a pedestrian plaza, a possible musical theater school, a 30,000-square-foot scene shop, riverfront walkways and, most dramatic of all, a showboat with a 700-seat dinner theater cruising the river. – Hartford Courant