67. Theatrical Real Estate

[Copyright Peter Schmitz, 2024.  All rights reserved.]

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History!  Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz. Our original theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci. Come along with us as we continue our Season Three, and tell the story of “Philadelphia, The Tryout Town.” This episode we’re really focusing on the family of businessmen who were more powerful and influential than any others in 20th Century American Theater: The Shuberts.

[TRYOUT TOWN THEME MUSIC - transition to Franz Schubert's "The Miller and the Brook"]

May 12th, 1905: In the dark early morning hours, there was a horrible train wreck south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A speeding express passenger train, heading west on the Main Line, had plowed into some cars from a freight train that had buckled and derailed on a parallel track. The passenger carriages careened off down the Susquehanna river bank, which was bad enough, but it turned out that one of those buckled freight cars contained a load of dynamite. Within seconds there was a huge explosion, and many of the derailed cars in both trains caught fire. Though some people managed to scramble out of the wreckage, others were trapped in their sleeping berths, and burned to death. Twenty-two were killed, and a hundred and fifty others were injured.  

The newspapers were full of stories about the wreck for days thereafter - the all-too-familiar procession of articles of sudden death, miraculous survival, loss, and the fickleness of random fate. But one victim was mentioned in almost every story: Sam S. Shubert was among the dead.

Sam Shubert had been on his way to Pittsburgh, to argue before a local court in a dispute with the Shuberts’ business rivals, the Theatrical Syndicate. The Syndicate were the group of New York and Philadelphia producers, led by the ruthless Abe Erlanger, who, as we discussed back in Episode 43, then controlled most of the theaters in America. The Shuberts aimed to break that control. But now Sam, the most imaginative and creative mind of the three brothers, was gone.

[CROSSFADE: MUSIC TRANSITIONS TO - "Leben im Shtejtl" Continue, under]

It had only been almost a quarter century since the Szemansky family had arrived in America, refugees from Shervient, Lithuania, fleeing the brutal anti-Jewish pogroms that were sweeping the Russian Empire in the early 1880s. They had been renamed by an American immigration officer who was unwilling or unable to spell “Szemansky,” and who was annoyed by their father David’s Yiddish pronunciation of his home village. “Shervient” became “Shurbent” and finally “Shubert”. There’s your name now, welcome to America. Of course, unlike the famous composer, there was no C in there between the S and the H. The family just shrugged and accepted it. It was all part of building their new life in America, and the family ended up settling in the northern industrial city of Syracuse, New York. David proved to be a terrible provider and a chronic alcoholic, so the first years were ones of grinding, abject poverty, lessened only by the grudging charity from their Jewish neighbors. While their mother and sister took in laundry and did sewing, the eldest boy, Levi, just ten years old, fought his way into the one space in the city he could earn money to support the family - the pavement in front of Syracuse’s Weiting Theatre - which then, like most American theaters of its day main hosted touring productions from New York, but also its own small stock company. 

For twelve hours a day, whatever the weather or however little he had to eat, he shined shoes, sold newspapers, and every night there was a performance, he ran to open rich theatergoers’ carriage doors for them, in exchange for tips. By unremitting, grinding work he was clearing several dollars a day. His younger brothers Shmuel and Jacob joined him, pooling their information and their incomes, and that little patch of theatrical real estate, that sliver of public sidewalk between the curb and front entrance, became the foundation of everything that was to come later in their lives. Eventually the kindhearted treasurer of the theater’s box office noticed the heroic struggles of the skinny and energetic boys, warming their hands on the small fire they would light in a bucket on the curb, and invited them inside the building, gave them real jobs. The Shuberts were on their way. 

Ten years later, barely out of their teens, the three Shuberts, assisted by their growing group of friends and a few cunning Syracuse investors, were already booking theatrical tours in upstate New York, expanding to Utica and Rochester and Albany. They had now dropped their Old World first names, and were calling themselves “Lee,” “Sam,” and “Jake.” Though they had only the barest of formal educations, Lee had developed a real head for numbers and contracts. Sam, who modeled his look and manner after the great Jewish director, playwright and producer David Belasco, was the most artistic. Jake (or J.J.), from whom the other two kept at a wary distance, was full of truculent violence, but liked the money, and still he was always part of the family business. Having literally struggled up from the street, from the gutter, they were all very canny about how to use every possible advantage from every opportunity they got. Using a loan from a local haberdashery store owner, the Shuberts organized the tour of a play they got rights to. They leased a few theaters, and then bought others. By 1900, they even made a sudden dash into the theatrical mecca of Manhattan, and bought the lease on the then-unprofitable Herald Square Theatre, at 36th Street and Broadway - way up above the popular theater district, which was then still further down along Broadway. But, just like everything else, they managed to make a success of it. 

[MUSIC OUT]

So, the Shuberts' rise was literally right at the beginning of the 20th century. Now you may notice that nowhere so far in this narrative, have we mentioned Philadelphia. But, the very first show the Shuberts staged on Broadway was something called The Brixton Burglary, a minor British farce they’d gotten the rights to. Amazingly, it became the first real leading role for Lionel Barrymore - one of the most well-known offspring of Philadelphia’s famous Drew/Barrymore clan - all of which by this point in time had all, quite understandably, left the rather moribund theatrical market of Philadelphia, and were plying the family trade from New York City.

Of the three famous offspring of Maurice and Georgiana Drew Barrymore, young Ethel Barrymore was already a rising young star. Shepherded into the stage by her famous uncle, the Broadway actor and Beau Brummel John Drew, Ethel was a leading lady of the most classy producer of the Theatrical Syndicate, Charles Frohman - who also still gave the occasional job to her dad, Maurice. But Ethel was the real hot property, already appearing regularly in plays both in New York and in London. Her brothers John and Lionel, however, were still struggling to get started in life, dabbling in drawing and music - and for the most part completely untrained for the stage, with only their family name as capital.

In his autobiography, Lionel Barrymore recounts the way he broke in with the Shuberts. Having left the cold-water flat he shared on W. 30th street with two other struggling young actors, to “pound the pavement” and “make the rounds” of producers’ offices, as the expression went. [Excuse me as I do my best Lionel Barrymore impression now] He was grabbing a quick bite to eat when someone said to him:

“Barrymore, a couple of newcomers from Syracuse are going to put on a show. Why don’t you go over and see them?”

“I gulped my lemonade and ran to the nearest exit, presenting myself somewhat breathless before Sam Shubert.”

“He was a small, harassed man and did not impress me. I told him I could act.”

“‘What is your salary?’ he asked”

“Up to this time in my career, actors of my stature who received fifty dollars a week were doing handsomely. Most of the time I had been delighted to accept thirty-five. But I thought: what the hell, we’ll give this thing a try, so I said ‘Seventy-five dollars a week.’”

“Sam survived my vaulting request. Possibly he thought he was getting Ethel.”

“‘This is a dressy part, you know,” he said.”

And by that, Sam Shubert was telling Lionel Barrymore that he’d have to pay for his own costumes himself. Despite the fact that the young actor had at the time no decent clothes at all besides the ones he was wearing, Barrymore nonchalantly shrugged, he says, indicating he was fine with the arrangement. Shubert shrugged back at him, offered him a job and told him rehearsals started tomorrow.

Lionel Barrymore’s work ethic, however, was very different from that of the almost maniacally possessed Shubert brothers. One day, feeling lazy, Lionel stayed in bed rather than go to rehearsal - remember that at the time actors were not paid to rehearse, and wouldn’t get that 75 bucks until the show opened. Anyway, he soon found his motivation to rise, when Sam Shubert himself suddenly appeared, banging at his apartment door, and barging into his room.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Barrymore?” Sam demanded. “Get up! Get out of there! Come to work! How can you ever expect to amount to anything lying there stinking in bed?”

“He then pleaded with me to be a better boy,” recalled Lionel. “It astonishes me to recall this scene. This was the great Sam Shubert, the founder of the syndicate. It was as if Louis B. Mayer were to rout me out of bed today.” [And there I’ll end my Barrymore impression.] But it worked. Lionel did get to rehearsal, and on May 20th 1901 The Brixton Burglary opened at the Herald Square Theatre. He got fairly decent notices, the show ran for 45 performances, and best of all, it made money. Both the Barrymore and Shubert family fortunes were on their way up, from that point. Lee and J.J., still running the theaters back upstate, were well pleased with the results of their enterprising brother’s venture.

And they were, all of them, beginning to attract attention. Again and again the Theater Syndicate tried to swat the Shuberts aside, tried to ruin them, tried to co-opt them. Abe Erlanger finally assigned the two Philadelphian members of the club, Nixon and Zimmerman, to co-produce shows with them, and then to squeeze them out and toss them aside. But it was Nixon and Zimmerman who eventually had to give way. The Shuberts had a fierce team of young lawyers on their side, and a keen eye for buying up otherwise marginal theatrical real estate, and making them pay. Soon they controlled theaters in Chicago and St. Louis, even London. And from a distressed producer, they got control of the Lyric Theatre in Manhattan.

They were learning the privileges of being eligible young male producers of successful shows, too. Now, it isn’t often mentioned in the theater history textbooks, but the sexual privileges of being a male theater producer back in those days was to us today - appalling. But to them it was - appealing. It was a transactional situation - a lot of pretty young women wanted to get a start in showbiz, and it was widely acknowledged that they could get that start in exchange for sex. You may remember that the Charlotte Cushman Society was founded in Philadelphia at about this time to provide a refuge for just this sort of thing.

But not all women at the time were averse to the system. Because once a girl had gotten cast in a show, and was placed in small roles or in chorus lines in alluring costumes, they could then try to attract the attention of what was called “the bald-headed rows” - rich middle-aged men who came to the theater just to meet chorines and ingenues - and maybe they could eventually date them, even (more often than you might think) marry them. It was a way up the social ladder, and accounted for the horror that a lot of respectable families regarded Life in the Theater for their own offspring - or their discomfort when their Uncle Wilberforce announced that he’d met a girl from the chorus of the Follies and it was love - TRUE LOVE, I tell you. But, going back to the Shuberts. They and other producers of the day like Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll, took full advantage of their control of that all-important first step. A lot of girls cycled in and out of the handy beds in rooms adjacent to  their offices. Lee and J.J. especially.

All three Shuberts also took advantage of the lack of record-keeping and documentation of their real origins. On insurance policies, they always claimed to be born in America. And their ages were always changing, they were always knocking off or adding years as it suited them. By early 1905, somehow Sam became the older brother of the trio, instead of the middle one. And they were building their reputations in the press, using the narrative that they were the heroic battlers of the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate. They even started their own theatrical newspaper, which came in especially handy after the Syndicate’s Iroquois Theatre in Chicago caught fire in late 1903, killing over 600 people. Public distaste for the old-school producers grew even more heated. Such great theater artists as Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske, and Sam’s hero David Belasco, started working exclusively with the Shuberts, instead.

And then, of course, Sam took that fateful train to Pittsburgh in May of 1905.

In the aftermath, the two remaining brothers, Lee and Jake, were gutted. It seemed like there was nothing left to do for the other two brothers to do, but to give up - to sell out to Erlanger and abandon the field. How could they go on, without Sam? And then, gathering strength again, they began to buy, and build. They would do it for Sam - who they from this point on referred to as their late oldest brother, even though he wasn’t. They invariably referred to him as “Sam S. Shubert” - even though he had never had a middle name. He may have been gone but they wouldn’t let his dream - or the false statements they had entered on insurance documents - die.

Most of this new expansion took place in New York, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, and Cincinnati - they were buying up theaters, buying lots on which they might later put theaters. Buying theaters they would later tear down and make into apartments - whatever worked. They were also producing revues, and operettas and plays at a furious pace. Not the best ones, admittedly, but they made money. They brought in new partners - an infusion of cash from a couple of Ohio River Valley businessmen did a lot to increase their working capital. They began forming a web of shell companies and interlocking partnerships, they invested in ticket brokerage firms, set construction studios, theatrical costume shops, lobby restaurants and bars, transfer companies. Wherever there was a buck to be made in the theater business, they wanted a piece of it.

But . . . What about their supposed implacable war with the Syndicate? Well, the Syndicate, though still hugely profitable and largely maintaining its dominant position in the legitimate theatrical market, was a little distracted by then. First there were several antitrust lawsuits being brought against them, which they had to defend, and right then Abraham Erlanger was obsessively trying to break into the vaudeville business. He saw the millions and millions that B.F. Keith was making in variety theaters and from his central booking office, and he wanted some of that, too. There’s nothing a monopolist hates so much as another monopolist - who is not giving him a cut.

While all this was going on the Shuberts - likewise determined to become monopolists themselves -  held off the Syndicate by signing a ten-year peace treaty with them, agreeing to not-compete in certain cities, including Philadelphia. Though secretly they were backing their friend, the furrier Marcus Loewe, who was engaging in what was inevitably called “The Philadelphia Vaudeville War” between him, Keith, and the Syndicate. Eventually by 1913 the war ended in a truce. Marcus Loewe got out of vaudeville - went into the movie theater business. The Shuberts owned some shares of that, too.

We already discussed back in Episode 46, when we were discussing impresario Oscar Hammerstein and Philly theater buildings during the other “war” of the era, the Opera War. We briefly mention how the Shuberts had built the twin Adelphi and Lyric Theatre, side by side just north of City Hall. And that was just like them, taking over slightly less advantageous real estate and turning it to their advantage. The Lyric and Adelphi became anchors in the growing Shubert chain of touring houses, hosting productions coming in and out of New York. Their friend and associate Morris Gest also used the Lyric for temporarily hosting prestigious foreign company tours, like the Abbey Players from Dublin in 1912 and the Moscow Art Theatre in 1923.

We also mentioned in that episode how the Shuberts invested with The Syndicate in the first Forrest Theatre on S. Broad Street. But they didn’t really control it, which they hated. That was prime theatrical real estate, as was the Garrick Theatre just to its north, and the old moorish-themed Broad Street Theatre to the south, across from the Academy of Music. Nixon and Zimmerman still controlled them - but the two longtime partners were getting old, and slipping. Their older theaters that were their core business badly needed renovation. Some, like the Park up in North Philadelphia, and the Chestnut Street Theatre, closed down. Some became movie theaters. As the two old partners eventually went to permanently inhabit their long-prepared family mausoleums in Philadelphia cemeteries, their sons and heirs had other priorities. Fred Nixon-Nirdlinger Jr., for example, became one of those sugar daddies who used the family theatrical fortune to entice one of those ambitious young beauties who crossed a stage that he owned in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He married her - although in the long run this romance did not work out very well for him. She eventually shot him to death at their villa in the South of France in 1931 - but that’s a story we’ll definitely have to tell in greater detail, another day.

Getting back to the Shuberts. In the year 1917 they managed to get the lease of the old Chestnut Street Opera House, which was now just down the block from the busy and palatial Keith’s Vaudeville theater. To revivify this new investment, they heavily altered the old Victorian interior in a similar way that we described the total renovation of the Walnut Street Theatre in 1920. It got a new neo-classical facade, too, the better for advertising its first show, a new operetta called You’re in Love produced by Oscar’s son, Arthur Hammerstein of all people - the Suberts and Hamemrstein’s always had a great faith in the commercial potential of operettas - you didn’t have to hire expensive stars and the composer - who often would conduct - was generally underpaid - or paid not at all, frankly. Nonetheless, it was soon followed by all the Shubert girlie revues such as Artists and Models or The Passing Show or The Greenwich Village Follies, or Mae West’s The Whirl of the Town.

As Lee and J.J. continued to build and acquire theater spaces in New York and elsewhere, they often named them after Sam. There were soon “Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theaters” in many American cities. They put one in New York, of course, the Shubert Theatre, on Shubert Alley, which still stands today - a glorious place. Their main house, their pride and joy, was the Winter Garden, up on the north end of the burgeoning Times Square Theatre district. Amazingly, this all success happened as Lee and J.J. Shubert had completely stopped speaking to each other - they just hated each other, from that point on, in their lives. They maintained separate offices across the street from each other, and their various minions and secretaries would spend all day going back and forth between the two powerful men, delicately omitting the abusive insults they screamed about their stupid S.O.B. of a brother. 

Besides the last name on the marquee, and Sam’s photograph hung reverently in the lobby, you could always tell a Shubert theater by going down to the public washrooms during intermission and trying the hot water taps on the bathroom sink. They never worked. The brothers saw no reason to fire up boilers just to heat water when people in a hurry to get back to their seats could just as easily use the cold water tap. Oh, plus there were complimentary drinking water fountains - but if you wanted a paper cup, you had to pay a penny.  

By this point, the Shuberts ten-year truce with the Syndicate now being expired, and sensing that Erlanger’s allies were falling by the wayside, the Shuberts made their big move.

In 1918 the Shubert Brothers wanted to build a Sam S. Shubert Me in Philadelphia, too, right across from the Forrest. So they bought the stunning beautiful 20 year-old Horticultural Hall from the high society folks at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, directly to the south of the old Academy of Music. Under the design plans of their in-house architect, a man named Herbert Krapp (K R A P P - I don’t write these jokes, folks, I just report them), the building, long a home for society balls and exhibitions, was mostly demolished (true the ornate interior staircase and part of the back wall was preserved) and rebuilt as a pre-Broadway 'tryout' house, The Sam S. Shubert Theatre. 

[MUSIC: CHU CHIN CHOW ]

The first show ever produced at Philadelphia's Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theatre in late August of 1918 was Chu Chin Chow, which had been a hit in London, and had staged on a mammoth scale. It was an orientalist piece of escapist fluff that had run for a year in New York. And although Chu Chin Chow sounds now sounds - to our ears - like it might have been a cringe-y setting in ancient China - actually, even worse, it was about a Chinese character named Chow, but the cringe-y setting was in Ancient Baghdad. So both Chinese and Arab. Indeed it was mostly stolen from the play Kismet and was a kind of predecessor to Timbuktu that - as we mentioned in our Holiday Episode - would so many years later play in that exact same theater.

Speaking of callbacks . . . Florence Reed - the Philadelphia born granddaughter of Pop Reed, the famous old prop man at the Walnut Street Theatre - was the leading the cast. Here’s a report of the evening, verbatim as it appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, filled with breathless prose that sounds like it was fed to them directly from the Shubert public relations office, which it probably was: [quotation not transcribed]

[MUSIC OUT]

Well, old Horticultural Hall wasn’t the last Philly landmark to fall to the Shuberts. By the mid-1920s they were one of the largest theatrical business concerns in the world. They WERE the new Syndicate. The Shubert circuit had 86 first-class theaters in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven and 25 other cities. They could seat a hundred and thirty thousand theatergoers a night, with returns of up to a million bucks a week. Lee claimed that he and J.J. controlled about 60 percent of high class theater in the U.S. and Canada. Pretty soon, they would go public, and the Shubert shares would be quickly snapped up on the New York Stock Exchange. Lee was being consulted on business projects in Hollywood, and helped to broker the merger which created Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Though Philadelphia was just a small part of their vast empire, they did not neglect it. In 1927, the long-standing arrangement between the Syndicate and the Shuberts was over. So the Forrest Theatre was sold and it was completely demolished, to be replaced by the enormous Fidelity Trust Building. To replace its function however, two theaters emerged, the Erlanger Theatre - which we’ll talk about another day - was being built on Market Street, while the Shuberts constructed the second Forrest Theatre on 11th and Walnut Streets, that, unlike the Erlanger, still stands today. Again, the architect was Herbert Krapp. And the building project was managed by a new Shubert, one that we need to introduce into our ongoing annals of Philadelphia Theater History.

Lee and J.J. Shubert, like many self-made men, trusted their childhood friends and their family above everybody else - even if they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, their loyalty could be counted on. Their oldest sister Fanny had a son named Larry Isaacs, who was born in Syracuse in 1895 - or maybe 1894 - again, there’s that Shubert fudging of dates. Larry’s father may or may NOT have been Isaac Isaacs who married Fanny Shubert around then. Many sources say that Fanny’s other son, Milton, was Larry’s half brother only, at any rate. But when Larry was a teenager, his uncle Jake hired him and put him to work as a treasurer in the Winter Garden in New York. But Larry, you know, was not regarded by his uncles as a very bright light. He was soon exiled to Philadelphia, to become the treasurer of the Lyric Theatre. And in Philadelphia Larry did okay, or at least well enough. He too began pursuing young female dancers that flocked around the theater, and he caught one - or maybe it was the other way around, anyway Larry married Frances Summerfield (who sometimes called herself Frances von Summerfield), a trained ballerina, in 1915. He seems to have converted to the Episcopal Church in order to marry her, too. From then on, in fact, Larry did everything to become as much like an old-family Philadelphia WASP as possible. Bought a big house in the tony suburb of Merion.

In early January 1919, he legally changed his name from Lawrence Shubert Isaacs to Lawrence Shubert Lawrence. And with that triple-barreled moniker - Lawrence Subert Lawrence - he went through the rest of his life. His wife was now invariably referred to in the Philadelphia society columns as “Mrs. Lawrence Shubert Lawrence.” He named their only son Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr., and sent him off to Episcopal Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, naturally.

Uncle Lee was still loyal to him, though, and he put Larry in charge of the construction of the new Forrest Theatre project on Walnut Street, despite the fact that he didn’t have much confidence in this Philadelphia branch of his family and his WASP-y Social Register aspirations. “You know, I’ve got a brother - J.J. - he’s an idiot, but not intentionally,” Lee once told a trusted employee. Then he shook his head. “But I got a nephew, Lawrence - he’s an idiot intentionally.”

Uncle J.J. Shubert, for his part, often fired Lawrence when he was mad about something stupid his nephew had done down in Philadelphia, but then Uncle Lee would hire him back again. Supposedly one of the stupidest things the pair considered that Lawrence Shubert Lawrence had done was in the construction of the new Forrest Theatre. Supposedly he had forgotten to include backstage dressing rooms in the original plans, and these had to be added later, at much expense, by buying an adjacent building, and digging an underground tunnel from it so that the performers could get from their dressing rooms to the stage and back. Now, I’m not sure that story is correct, it may just be the shape of the lot required it, certainly the architect was too experienced by this point to miss such a glaring thing - no dressing rooms? I mean, his name was Krapp, but . . .  His designs were really stunning, as anyone who visits the Forrest Theatre today, still a well-kept jewel in the Shubert Organization theatrical empire, can attest. 

What did it look like? As the faithful chronicler of Philadelphia theater buildings, the late Irving R. Glazer, once wrote:

“The interiors are a symphony of marble, crystal and red plush. The elegant entrance lobby has a green base with sky-rose above. The coffered ceiling has individual basket-type crystal fixtures. The lofty foyer has an arched cove-lit ceiling, crystal fixtures and delicate touches of gold and silver leaf. A great marble staircase rises at the far end . . .  the auditorium is done in Adams style in shades of old rose and gray. Crystal ceiling fixtures and wall fixtures are everywhere.” The orchestra, Glazer tells us, seated 60 players, the proscenium was forty feet wide, and overall it seated over 1800 people.

[MUSIC UNDER ] 

May 1, 1928: To match the splendor of the new Forrest Theatre’s house, The Red Robe, a lavishly produced operetta (of course), was the first play ever staged at the brand-new Forrest. The Red Robe was a musical adaptation of a play entitled "Under the Red Robe" itself adapted from a popular novel by Stanley Weyman. The Shuberts liked multiple layers of adaptation - they figured once three or four authors had had a crack at the script, it had real quality - As I said, The Shubert Brothers also set great store by the European-style operettas, and this was one of their most grandly produced works. The music was by composer Jean Gilbert, who was present at the Forrest that night and conducted the orchestra. The book and lyrics by the American writer Harry B. Gilbert (apparently no relation to his creative partner Gilbert). Walter Woolf played the role of the swashbuckling hero named Gil de Beraut, and his love interest Renee de Cocheforet was played by the young Evelyn Herbert.

Wrote the Inquirer: {quotation not transcribed]

And there we go. That’s our show for today. As we shall see in the future, the Shuberts, who were now well established in Philadelphia, would almost completely dominate the local commercial theater market for the next four decades. We’ll be back again next month with some more episodes, probably a series of shorter ones, detailing various shows that tried out or had their world premieres in Philadelphia during the 1920s and 1930s - in Shubert houses, mostly, because that’s mostly all there was. Though we’ll talk about the Erlanger Theatre too, and all the new combination movie and stage theaters being built by the Mastbaums. I know we had a lot of talking, and less music in this episode, but I hope to have more music in the upcoming ones.  [MUSIC OUT]
The Sound editing and engineering was all done by My Humble Self, here at our studios in our World Headquarters high atop the Tower of Theater History. If you’ve been enjoying this season of the podcast, or have any thoughts or suggestions, drop us an email at AITHpodcast@gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you! To support our show and to get access to bonus material and special insider info about Philly theater history, our Patreon page is Patreon dot com/AITHpodcast. Or, another way to thank us, is to leave some stars and/or a review about the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - or you can do that right on our website w w w dot, AITHpodcast.com that helps us out so much. And while you’re visiting the website check out the blog post for this episode - we'll share some images of The Shuberts and many of the events and performers that we talked about today.

Thank you for listening, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

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