There’s history, and then there’s history.

Some people have to be the very first to get the latest in cell phones or video-game systems. They’ll camp out for days in front of their favorite store to ensure that they’re on the cutting edge.

Evan and Louise Jackson, of Madison, Conn., stroll through the garden outside Matunuck’s Theatre by the Sea on Wednesday. The theater reopened after nearly four years.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

Me? I’m into history of a more enduring sort. And so, when I heard that Theatre by the Sea was reopening after nearly four years of being closed, I knew I had to be in the theater’s first crowd, to experience for myself the thrills and spills of getting this South County landmark back up and running.

Wednesday night, that bit of Rhode Island theatrical history took place. Just a month and a half after the theater was sold, its SeaHorse Grill saw two rooms full of paying customers, and more at the bar. Actors and musicians made their magic in the old barn hall. Hundreds of patrons found their way to Matunuck through a downpour, undaunted.

But hours beforehand, the scene was far quieter, as cast and crew came down the homestretch …

9:15 a.m. The actors and technicians, almost all of whom are living above the SeaHorse Grill’s cabaret room, in an inn converted from an old farmhouse, are just waking up after the previous day’s “10 out of 12” — 10 hours working out of 12, including a practice performance of the opening show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for a small invited audience.

I notice a faint musty smell — not surprising in a building just being aired out after years of disuse — as Jason Parrish, the artistic administrator, shows me around the theater. Though I’ve attended numerous shows at Matunuck, I’ve never seen the orchestra pit, which turns out to really be a pit, a snug, covered room dug out below ground level to the right of the stage. The musicians are miked so the crowd can hear them, but they can’t see the actors, and it looks like they have almost no room to move. This would be no place for anyone with even mild claustrophobia.

Because the stage has been freshly painted, the “ghost light” — a lamp with a single bulb and no shade — is off in the wings. Theater folk are a superstitious lot, and Parrish says that this is the actor’s traditional way of “keeping the spirits occupied.”

2 p.m. Amiee Turner, the producing artistic director, is onstage working with Jean-Pierre Ferragamo, who’s in the lead role of Pseudolus, the conniving Roman slave who wants his freedom. Turner, who is directing Forum, is giving him notes on his performance from the night before, using her body to show him how she wants him to move, telling him in detail how she thinks he can get more laughs. Ferragamo listens and responds amiably.

Upstairs, managing producer Joel Kipper, a baseball cap perched backward on his head, is waiting for the arrival of new lights that have to be hung before the show. Like almost everyone else here, he’s young — 28, he says, but a veteran nonetheless of almost two decades in the theater — and exhausted. He overslept his 8 a.m. alarm by a half-hour this morning after being up until 3:30 a.m. the night before.

The late hours aren’t unusual during Tech Week, since — unlike the actors — “I don’t get dismissed at 11.” But last night was worse than usual. Around 3 a.m., he and Turner needed to clean up the “garbage” that had accumulated over the years in the gazebo — and there stood a skunk, right in the middle of it.

“I’m not going to end my day like this, getting sprayed by a skunk,” he thought. And so he and Turner waited 20 minutes until the skunk was good and ready to leave.

2:40 p.m. Ayla Ocasio, box office manager, is printing the tickets for tonight’s preview. Some 415 of the theater’s 503 seats have already been sold — with walkups, the number will climb to more than 430.

That’s a “very, very full house,” she says with satisfaction.

2:45 p.m. In the kitchen of the SeaHorse Grill — the restaurant will retain that name for this season, then change next year to Bistro by the Sea — Duane Crowe is cutting steaks. With his wife, Karleen, Crowe owned the restaurant for seven years under the theater’s old management, and worked there beginning in 1988.

Like many others who’d been associated with the theater over the years, the Crowes were eager to get involved when they heard the place was coming back. “We raised our kids and a hundred other people’s kids here at Theatre by the Sea, and we really missed it,” Duane Crowe says.

Recruiting a wait staff wasn’t hard, even so late in the season, and with only two weeks between the agreement to run the place and its opening. “We put out a sort of a call to arms,” he says, and the “kids” who’d waited tables or bused them over the years — some now in their 30s and early 40s, some law and medical students on summer break, even a URI graphics professor — responded. Ninety percent are SeaHorse veterans.

“This has always been a sort of summer camp for adults,” Crowe says with a ready smile.

Hiring a staff wasn’t all Crowe had to do to get ready. “When we all left,” he says, “we shut everything down, did a cursory cleanup and left.” So the place needed a lot of cleaning, airing out and touching-up of paint. And there was a menu to tweak.

But the restaurant’s signature dish, Chicken Savannah — chicken breasts sautéed with peaches, pecans and curry, then finished with Frangelico hazelnut liqueur — was sacrosanct. “We can’t leave it off,” the Crowes decided.

Sure enough, this evening the Chicken Savannah will be the SeaHorse’s top seller.

3:20 p.m. In the theater’s shop, “topiaries” for the sides of a door in the scenery are still being painted. So is a “marble” bust that provides a sight gag as well as a plot point.

Onstage, director Turner gives actor Ferragamo a 10-minute break before the full cast will work on a couple of problem points, then speed-run the whole show.

As the actors assemble, Turner recalls the previous month’s work of transforming the empty theater back into a working space.

“The first day we hung the lights on this stage, it was kind of a thrilling moment,” she says. “Because there should be lights on this stage.”

3:35 p.m. In the un-air-conditioned theater, the actors fan themselves and stretch as there’s a pause in the action. Out of costume, with no makeup, they look like anybody else.

A half-dozen of them wear beige stretch bands around their chests or stomachs. I wonder if an outbreak of injuries has caused so many to be wearing braces. A moment later, one actor turns, and I realize that this is how the battery packs for their microphones are held on.

Turner stops again to work out a bit of business with three actors who must pass and re-pass one another as they pretend to be unaware of each other’s existence.

With the opening curtain less than five hours away, the director is calm, precise and decisive as she explains what has to happen in which small areas of the stage.

“Maybe this needs to be choreographed,” she says, and choreographer Andrea Eskin looks up with sudden interest, half-rises from her seat. But Turner simply means that the steps should be counted out in each direction as the actors walk the stage.

She demonstrates, and then the actors run this bit of the scene again, and then again. All agree it’s working much better now.

5:30 p.m. Frank Sinatra is singing “Strangers in the Night” on the sound system in the SeaHorse Grill as the restaurant greets its first customers. A moment later, a sudden rainstorm drenches patrons making their way through the theater’s lush gardens and from its nearby parking lot. The rain and sun will play hide-and-seek for the next two hours.

There are fresh flowers in vases in the ladies’ room, my wife tells me, but the cover is missing from a fan, and one stall has a sign saying, “Out of Order.”

Still, the house-made foccacia is garlicky and good, the smashed potatoes creamy and full of big, soft lumps, the tuna grilled just as ordered, its melon salsa accenting it without hiding the fish’s good flavor. The Key lime pie, also made at the SeaHorse, is tart and smooth.

Owner Bill Hanney walks by, looking, he says, like a “drowned rat.” He’s on crutches, the result of a recent tendon problem.

“Somebody said, ‘Break a leg,’ so I did,” he jokes.

6:50 p.m. In the theater, the bright light of a TV camera signals that a reporter is interviewing Hanney for the 11 o’clock news.

Out in the lobby, 81-year-old Ottis M. Winslow is showing the ropes to new house manager Erin Romero. With her late husband, Donald, and by herself, Winslow was the theater’s house manager for 15 years, overseeing the ushers, dealing with seating problems, being the theater’s face for the public. Now she is passing the torch, and her long list of volunteer ushers, to the next generation.

Winslow kept her roster of 91 ushers during the years the theater was dark. When the new management team was announced, “I wanted to see them get a good start,” she says. So she phoned all 91 veterans, and 71 have agreed to work this show, 6 or 7 at a time.

Right now, tonight’s ushers are busy stuffing a late-breaking insert into the program, thanking almost two dozen people who’ve helped the theater get re-launched. Near the top of the list is Winslow.

7:05 p.m. The newly painted stage gets a final mopping. The orchestra, clad in black T-shirts and black shorts, makes those up-and-down-the-scale sounds that show it’s getting ready.

A few minutes later, the sounds of vocal warm-ups — and laughter — drift from an open backstage window.

7:35 p.m. As the crowd begins to stream into the theater, there’s a problem: The new high-tech tickets with bar codes the theater has begun using are scanning all right, but e-tickets printed out at home are not. Several patrons are momentarily delayed while the issue is sorted out.

8:12 p.m. Turner mounts the stage and stands before the big red curtain to address the crowd.

“Welcome, everybody!” she says. “It’s been a long couple of years, huh?”

A voice from the crowd shouts back: “Yes!”

Turner welcomes the audience to “the very first preview performance at Theatre by the Sea” — hearty applause here — and asks the theatergoers to “laugh loud and laugh often.”

8:15 p.m. Ferragamo, now in the costume of a very jazzy Roman slave, battles his way out from behind the curtain in a comedic moment that opens the show.

10:34 p.m. The curtain comes down to thunderous applause and a standing ovation.

What happens in between those opening and closing moments? Well, this isn’t The Journal’s official review, and I’m not The Journal’s critic. And the show’s official press opening isn’t until tonight.

So let me just say that I’ve seen more than one previous production of this show, including a 1999 version at Theatre by the Sea that starred Lennie Watts, then a Matunuck mainstay. And this was better — much better — than any of them.

There is much more of the story of Theatre by the Sea to be written. But on this historic night, it felt like a very good kind of theatrical history was being made.

arosenbe@projo.com