8. New Year's Day at the New Theatre, 1800

© Podcast text copyright - Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME MUSIC] 

Hello! Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia. Today we are NOT going to discuss the entire history of Philadelphia theater from 1800 to 1820. Guess what? There’s so much to talk about, we’re not going to get any farther than the very first day of that stretch of time. Wednesday, January 1st, 1800. As an example of what American theater was like in this era, let’s regard it as a kind of time-capsule to a lost era and as a way to bring back to life the activity inside a once-flourishing and famous theater building that now exists only as reproductions in the pages of history books or in virtual form as .png image files on the internet..

On New Year's Day 1800 the House of Representatives was in session in Philadelphia. It may surprise us now, but in those days this was not a holiday, not a day to stop working - it was just a Wednesday - so the speeches and resolutions and committee reports went on as usual. Congressman John Randolph of Virginia rose and delivered a speech (and I’m going to use a very high-pitched voice for Randolph, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute). He attacked the current state of the American army whose soldiers he described as being nothing but “mercenaries and ragamuffins”- which caused quite a stir among his listeners, as he intended. The entire Congress and President John Adams were still in Philadelphia in January 1800, not due to move to the largely empty and comfortless Federal City still under construction in the District of Columbia, until later that year. Most elected officials from elsewhere in the country, including Randolph, were determined to enjoy the pleasures of Philadelphia while they could. So, upon adjournment, many of them made their way from Congress Hall to the theater, just a few steps away, for an evening's entertainment. A thousand or so other Philadephians joined them, though the wealthier patrons had already sent their servants ahead to hold the best places for them, since seats were not reserved.

Among the crowd was a journalist and man about town named Joseph Dennie. Dennie, was dressed in his signature outfit of a pea-green coat, white vest and stockings, and huge silver buckles on his shoes. He was turning over in his mind a plan he had to start a new journal called The Port Folio, and to become one of those new breed of American writer: a Theater Critic.  He also strode along Chestnut Street, presented his ticket, and made his way inside the theater and found his seat.

So, what was on offer that evening to delight and transport Philadelphia audiences? The advertisement in the Federal Gazette would have prepared them.

“NEW THEATRE: This evening, January 1st, 1800, will be presented a favorite COMEDY, in three acts, called THE MIDNIGHT HOUR.  . . [Then] an occasional prologue will be spoken by Mr. Wignell, to which will be added, for the first time this season, a Grand Dramatic Romance called BLUE BEARD; or, FEMALE CURIOSITY.  . . The door of the theater will be open at a quarter past 5, and Curtain rise at a quarter past 6 o’clock, precisely.”

The Midnight Hour, was a light comedy by the English actress and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald - translated from the French (which is a nice way of saying she mostly stole the plot and characters from Beaumarchais).  Many of the members of the regular New Theatre acting company, whom by this time Philadelphia’s audiences had all gotten every chance to know and to love, were in the cast of the play. These actors, by the way, were always referred to, in advertisement by their formal names, actors of their day were quite aware that their profession was still not totally socially acceptable in the best society. In their own conversations they always addressed each other as “Mr Wood and Mrs. Wood, Mr. Warren, Mr. Cooper, Mrs Merry, Mrs. Oldmixon, Mr. Bernard, Miss Jones”. . .etc.

The green room backstage at the New Theater, where the actors gathered once they were in costume, was a very formal place, with actors sitting quietly, engaging each other in respectful tones, carefully monitored by the senior members of the company. All actors waited for the prompter’s call boy to come running in and summon them for their entrances. It was considered a breach of manners for actors to linger in the wings if they weren’t needed onstage. After all, they might get in the way of the stage carpenters moving the scenery in and out. At any rate, there was no need to wait in the wings upstage, because all entrances and exits were made via the two proscenium doors, well downstage of the scenery, and most dramatic action took place on the broad forestage near the audience. This was especially true of light comedies such as The Midnight Hour.

The Midnight Hour was one of those sentimental comedies in which lovers are first introduced, then thwarted and kept apart by the older generation (in this play much amusement was gained through the hero hiding in a large box onstage which is subjected to many indignities by household servants, with him inside). Since the play was set in Spain, the stage crew dutifully moved the painted “Spanish Scenery”, pulled from the company’s stock of set designs, using the grooves in the floor for the side wings, and painted backdrops lowered from above to present standard views of street scenes or interior rooms. Finally, as everyone in the audience expected, at the end all lovers were united, all secrets revealed, and The actor playing the Spanish Marquis, neatly and pleasingly tied up all the plot complications as he delivered the final lines: 

“I will repay every servant, who either by their genius have aided, or by their fidelity obstructed, my designs; for, possessed of such a blessing as my Julia, I shall ever remember with gratitude the adventures of this day, and never cease to reflect with rapture on the “Midnight Hour.”

After this conclusion, the curtain came down; and while the stage crew worked to bring on the sets and stage machinery for the next play, Thomas Wignell, the manager of the company, stepped onto the fore-stage to deliver a direct address to the audience. He spoke about the play - a Romance - he was presenting next, for the first time this season, for their approval. Stocky, handsome and friendly, Thomas Wignell was well-beloved by the Philadelphia audience, since he had been resident in the city for many years. Growing up in England in a theatrical family, he had studied with David Garrick himself, played at Drury Lane Theatre, and then had come to America with his cousin Lewis Hallam in 1774. As part of Hallam’s company, he became a fixture in New York theater world, and in fact played the role of Jonathan, the first Stage Yankee, in Royal Tyler’s play The Contrast, the first truly American drama that you might have been assigned to read if you’ve ever taken a course on Early American literature. Wignell had been instrumental in the Old American Company’s efforts to re-legitimize theater in America after the Revolutionary War. He had rebelled against what he considered the overly controlling and miserly management of the Old American Company, however, and had formed a new company in Philadelphia, and had performed in hundreds of plays and comedies in the city ever since.

Years later the theater historian Charles Durang, who knew Wignell, would write a lovely tribute to him: “From the liberal and just manner with which Mr. Wignell conducted this theatre, he gained no profits but incurred liabilities. He loved the profession for its sake alone. He was an actor, and sought the elevation of the theatre, not its degradation by the love of lucre. He did not look on the temple of the muses as a mere broker’s shop.” 

Though he may not have been overly interested in money for himself, from the very beginning, Wignell had founded his company on the idea that it was going to be a Very Classy Place. Only the best, for the New Theater. A number of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families had invested significant sums of money, one hundred shares were sold at $300 each and each Subscriber, as they were called, got permanent passes to every show the company performed, they owned the house, as it were.  

With this subscriber money, Wignell had gone back to England, and gotten architectural drawings for his elegant new structure which seems to have been rather based on Covent Garden theater in London - not the Royal-Theatre, in Bath, as I said in an earlier episode. I made that mistake honestly, because that’s a fact commonly repeated and you’ll see it printed everywhere, including Wikipedia and such other easily accessible sources, but it’s not evidently, you know, true. That’s one of the many things I’m trying to do here: Do the deep digging and make a better record for everyone to share.

On his annual trips to England, Wignell also collected scripts, music, scenery, props - and most importantly actors - an entire company of performers, and very promising ones, by all accounts. There was a wealth of theatrical talent in the British Isles that were frustrated by the limited opportunities of the Theatrical World there, and they were willing to try their luck in the Theatrical World of Philadelphia.

For all this labor, Wignell was justly termed “The Atlas of American Theater” - it rested on his shoulders. (You can see a magnificent portrait of Wignell with that very title, painted in 1792 by the artist John Russell. It’s on the blog for the episode on our website AITHpodcast.com - the link, as always, is in the show notes.) And although he became an American citizen and staged many a patriotic tableaux at the New Theater, the plays there remained reliably British in provenance and presentation. Although it occasionally staged new plays by American authors, The New Theatre - and it must be stressed, the audience that they catered to - it remained culturally deeply attached to the tastes of the English stage. Indeed we can see all American theaters (whether in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Annapolis, or Charleston) at this point in time were essentially outposts of the larger Trans-Atlantic British theatrical culture. Stage conventions, company organization, salary scales, stage designs, and repertoire were all drawn from English models. Tragedies, farces, sentimental comedies, romances, after-pieces, operas, all done in the English style of the late 18th Century, with plenty of Shakespeare and Sheridan, but increasingly a LOT of pantomimes, melodramas and Romantic spectacles like Blue Beard.

And like in the London theaters of the day, the audience could be very unruly and the experience of attending the theater exposed one to all sorts of dangers and other unwelcome social interactions. The following week in January, a wealthy but very foolish gentleman named Stanley decided to come to the theater with over thirteen hundred dollars in his wallet, and had his pocket neatly slit open and his wallet removed. Political fights had often occurred in the audience of the theater in the 1790s, as we noted before, and as the new decade began everyone in Philadelphia knew well that the theater was a very exciting but also very daunting place to go. Not only thieves but prostitutes, sailors, servants, and workingmen filled the galleries and the pit, there was social mixing with people of different classes and different races. Romantic liaisons might even occur. William Penn the founder of Philadelphia had been right to warn his fellow Quakers away from the theater, after all, perhaps. And though they no longer dominated the cultural or political scene in the city, members of the Society of Friends pointedly and famously still did NOT attend plays, and any one of them would have been called to account in Weekly Meeting, if they had ever tried to. But the rest of the citizenry generally found it a thrilling social pastime.The famous Philadelphia Quaker diarist Elizabeth Drinker, noted in her diary about this time that although she of course did not consider going to the theater herself, her household servant Sall Dawson “was determined, and did go to a play this evening, did not come home till mid-night - she has a beaux after her”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

We now go back to Wignell in the theater again on the first of January 1800, as he turns his gaze from the wealthier members of the audience sitting arrayed in the boxes ringing the house, and he issued one of his regular imprecations to the male audience members sitting on the benches directly in front of him, in Pit - to please avoid partaking of the new fashion of smoking cigars during the performance. (Apparently the gentlemen of Philadelphia paid little attention to him, as repeated pleas to stop smoking can be found in articles and ads for years thereafter.)

Wignell was entirely justified in his nervousness about lit cigars. The Federal Street Theater in Boston had burned down in 1798. And you may remember from Episode 6 of our podcast that just a few weeks before there had been the disastrous fire that destroyed John Bill Ricketts’ Circus and Art Pantheon at the opposite side of 6th and Market Streets. The New Theater had only been saved from being caught up in the conflagration by the direction of the wind. So fire was a real and ever-present danger. Put out your cigars, carefully, please, gentlemen.

And as you may also remember, the other news that had recently arrived in Philadelphia was of the death of the former President George Washington at his home in Virginia. On December 23rd, the New Theatre’s facade was draped in Black, which must have been all the more bleak looking, as the theater faced the field of ruins and ashes where the circus had stood. The management scheduled a special performance of Washington’s favorite tragedy, entitled The Roman Father. A ‘monody’ or a solemn poem of mourning, was read from the stage, and then while a small chorus of actors sang a solemn tune, the audience (who were all dressed in mourning clothes  too for the occasion) watched as a large painted stage curtain was revealed, illuminated from behind. In the middle of the image was a pyramidal tomb with a portrait of the late hero. On top of the image was an eagle, weeping tears of blood.  It may seem like an odd and strange night at the theater, so close to Christmas as it was, but we have to remember that this was rather like us today, turning on the television or computer to see the memorial service of a great public figure. The theater was really the only public institution where all Philadlephians could gather, in a time of civic mourning, and participate in a ceremony of general remembrance.

As Wingell had announced, the next play on the bill was Blue Beard; or Female Curiosity. This was a Romantic dramatization of the famous French fable about the nobleman who leaves his new wife alone in the castle, provided she promised NOT TO LOOK in all the locked rooms (which of course she does, hence the subtitle Female Curiosity) - and to her horror she finds the bodies of her husband’s former wives. By the 18th Century, dramatic versions of the story were typically set not in France but in a Turkish harem, in order to give an occasion for exotic scenery and Oriental costumes. Colman’s play had only two years before been a successful sensation on the London stage, running for 150 performances at Drury Lane. For this Philadelphia production, Wignell had paid a good sum of money for the rights to the play, and had then pulled out all the stops to produce it, with fantastic Romantic scenic elements of Anatolian woods and secret chambers filled with skeletons, a scimitar-waving villain, and a full band of marching Turkish soldiers. Wignell’s business partner, the musician Alexander Reinagle, was leading his orchestra, conducting from the keyboard, and had composed all kinds of ‘Turkish’ music. The action of the play was interspersed with songs and dance numbers to delight the crowd. 

As the play begins, we see a young man, Selim, serenading underneath the window of his love, the beautiful Fatima. But Selim is disappointed when instead Fatima is sent away to become the latest wife of the powerful Bashaw, Abolemique (played by the company’s hefty comedian, actor William Warren), who has a room full of the bodies and skeletons of former wives moldering away. Not wanting (yet) to add his new wife to the pile, he orders his servant Shacabac to keep her away from this room at all costs. Shacabac assures his master it shall be done. “The inhabitants of the inner apartment might terrify a man of tender nerves, but what are they to me? Only a few flying phantoms, sheeted specters, skipping skeletons, and grinning ghosts at their gambols - and as to those who had once the honour to be your wives,  . . they are harmless enough now!”

Rather a thrilling and grisly scene, I must say. Although reading over the play myself, a couple of centuries later and a world away, I must say it’s all the anti-Muslim rhetoric  and casual racism of  Colman’s script that rather horrifies me. However, that was apparently not the issue that bothered the critics of the day, not at all. 

“Oliver Oldstyle” (the nom de plume of the dapper Joseph Dennie, whom we met earlier), writing later in his new magazine The Port Folio, had aesthetic, rather than moral objections about the production. He was particularly pointed in his poor estimation of the performance of comedian John Bernard, who was playing the role of the Shacabac. Oldstyle wrote of Bernard’s tendency to go off-script and ad lib witticisms and improvised stage business: “In Blue-Beard - although we wish not to ‘set down aught in malice,’ we are compelled to find fault with Mr. Bernard, -- This gentleman’s merits are truly various, and truly great. He can excite our risibility by the most natural delineations of humour, and awaken our feelings by the finest touches of nature and truth; but he sometimes takes liberties with his author, and degenerates almost into buffoonery. Such was the case  . . . in the part of Schacabac. We have so often felt the highest satisfaction from his powers, that we cannot but be mortified at beholding them for an instant degraded.”

There were other patrons in the audience that night who were in rather a disagreeable mood. Two American officers were still smarting about the words spoken against the army on the floor of Congress that day. While one of the most spectacular scenic passages of the show began, as a band of the theater’s musicians costumed as Turks paraded about the stage, (their faces darkened with soot or burnt cork in order to provide the expected faces for ‘Moors’). The two officers,  Captain James McKnight, and Lieutenant Michael Reynolds, nevertheless let their eyes wander around the audience, and they spotted the small slight figure of Congressman John Randolph, the very politician who had insulted their pride. Randolph sat alone in one of the expensive boxes that ringed the theater’s audience space, wrapped in a voluminous cape to ward off the cold in the unheated theater.

Randolph was a very elegant figure, an extremely wealthy planter and fervent supporter of fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson. He was heir to an extensive Roanoke family estate and of many enslaved human beings, and was bellicose and irascible with a slashing wit, but also quite physically vulnerable. Due to either a genetic flaw or to the effects of a childhood infection with tuberculosis, he had never gone through puberty. His voice remained high in the soprano range, and his form was slender and somewhat effeminate - non-binary, as we might say nowadays, although that is not a term he would have either recognized or welcomed.

Anyway, the two soldiers saw Randolph, and decided it was a perfect moment to repay the insult to their service. They sidled into his box, and McKnight, watching the dark-faced Turkish band on stage, said to his companion:

“These are well-looking mercenaries!”

Randolph pointedly ignored him.

Reynolds, eyeing him narrowly, asked him: “What do you think of these ragamuffins? These ragamuffins are not Pennsylvania ragamuffins, they are black Virginia ragamuffins!”

McKnight, who was a very large man, then roughly attempted to sit down alongside Randolph and the tiny Virginiah was much bruised, as McKnight was not at all careful with his elbows and his feet. Finally, the soldiers, feeling that they had made their point, exited the box. McKnight pulled at Randolph’s cape as they left, and Randolph angrily snatched it back, hissing through clenched teeth that the man was “a Puppy”. He considered challenging his antagonist to a duel, but decided that the ragamuffin wasn’t enough of a gentleman to merit an appeal to pistols.

Meanwhile back on stage the play Blue Beard was reaching its suspenseful high point. Perhaps Randolph could be distracted again by the duet being sung by the inquisitive Fatima and her sister Irene (played by Miss Broadhurst and Mrs. Warren), as they considered opening the forbidden door in the palace:

At the end of the song Fatima puts the key in the door and reveals the skeletons of the former contained within with a warning sign placed over their head “THE PUNISHMENT OF CURIOSITY”! The two women shriek and fearfully cling to each other, while Bernard, as Shacabac, enters the room. “She knows the secret, and she dies!” yells Shacabac. He seizes them, and all seems destined to end quite badly. Fatima is hauled before her husband, Abolemique for her execution. He pulls out his curved scimitar, and is about to behead --- when Selim, her true love, appears with a group of companions! A fight breaks out, . . . and then, in a moment that surely NOBODY saw coming, one of the skeletons rises up, and grabs Abolemique’s dagger and plunges it into the back of the villain, who sinks through the floor, while the fires of hell rise up to consume him. Now that’s a moment you’ll undoubtedly remember, and I must admit it was a much more Gothic climax than I had previously thought had ever happened on the Chestnut Street stage. 

At any rate, Selim and Fatima happily embrace and the entire company breaks into a final chorus, singing about the Joy of being raised from Despair, and the play ends with a paean to the Sweet Delights of Love.

[MUSIC. SFX - APPLAUSE]

The curtain descended, and as Alexander Reinagle’s orchestra played a final reprise of the chorus, the Philadelphia audience went off into the chilly January night. Congressman John Randolph went back to his solitary lodgings to soothe his injuries and to write an indignant letter to President Adams, demanding an investigation. The critic Joseph Dennie went back home to sharpen his pen.  Captain McKnight and Lieutenant Reynolds went back to their barracks. But, someone like Elizabeth Drinker’s serving woman Sal Dawson, if she was there? Well, she likely slipped away to meet her beau, waiting for her beneath the trees in the open park to the south of Congress Hall, and off they went, no doubt, to reflect with rapture on the “Midnight Hour.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Among theater historians, The New Theatre (or “the first Chestnut Street Theatre”) is regarded as the Philadelphia theater institution that matters above ALL others, to this day. You can see it in every theater history textbook: that from 1794 to about 1814, this theater company was the leading center for fine drama in the United States. There are oodles of academic papers and monographs and dissertations devoted to what went on in this theater, what it looked like, who was in the audience and all the actors, playwrights, scenic artists, musicians and dancers who created dramas and spectacles to be performed there.

And yet, nowadays in Philadelphia itself, I can personally attest that there is almost no local memory at all of the New Theatre, on Chestnut Street, nearby Independence Hall (nobody’s called it Congress Hall for a long time). Where it once stood, there is no historical marker, and if I mentioned it to almost any current local actor, stagehand, playwright or producer working in Philadelphia today, I guarantee, I would be met mostly with puzzled looks.

Why is this? Well, a lot of it is just the loss of the physical building. The original one burned down in 1820, and it was rebuilt, but much of the historical record was lost in the fire. You can only wave your hand at a place on 6th and Chestnut where other structures now stand, and say “It used to be about  . . there.” And another maddening thing is that although we have quite a few drawings and sketches, entire paintings, like the Krimmel painting of the Oyster Seller we talked about last episode - they all vary to some degree in their details. Evidently despite all the effort to improve it over the time it existed, the front of the building never quite was resolved. Artists who attempted to draw it kept trying to make it look better, each in their own way. So there’s no single iconic image to be cemented in our minds.

Another thing is the repertoire the company performed - almost none of the plays or operas or popular songs of that era remain in the standard repertoire. They are almost all either terribly dated, or, like Colman’s Blue Beard, are unperformable as written. The style of performance and acting has changed drastically, too. No current theater organization really tries to recreate an evening at the Chestnut, as I have attempted to do today. There’s just too much explaining to be done. Plus, it‘s been a while.

The last thing is that the New Theater’s  institutional centrality as a social meeting place for Philadelphia’s elite was largely replaced when the booming city expanded at a colossal pace in the mid-19th Century. As the wealthy families of the city grew even more wealthy and numerous, they desired an even larger and much more ornate theater to meet each other in. Another subscription was taken up in the 1850s and this one was used with the express purpose of creating an even better home for theater, grand opera, concerts and plays. The second Chestnut Street Theatre, or Old Drury, as it was called by then, was abandoned and torn down as an outmoded relic of a former era. A palatial new theater was constructed and completed, in 1857. So I guess if we want to find the enduring legacy of the theater that once stood on 6th and Chestnut Street we really have to look to the corner or Broad and Locust, where the Academy of Music still stands today. And thank goodness for that. It's a wonderful place to go for a show on New Year’s Day in Philadelphia.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music is by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History, Philadelphia.