"Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia" is now a BOOK! Order a copy at your local bookstore! Online orders HERE:
December 13, 2024

90. The Arts Centers: New Philly Theaters for the 1970s

Three new Philadelphia theater complexes are built for the mid-century modern era - funded by wealthy philanthropists.

Three new Philadelphia theater complexes are built for the mid-century modern era - funded by wealthy philanthropists.

Three new Philadelphia theater complexes are built for the mid-century modern era - funded by wealthy philanthropists. The Annenbergs would donate grand new modernist Arts Centers at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the Haas family would spearhead the drive to renovate the old Walnut Street Theatre.

For a blog post with photos of all three theaters and other events described in the episode, go to our website: https://www.aithpodcast.com/blog/mid-century-modern/

Support the show

"Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia" the BOOK is in bookstores now!
To see a listing on our publisher's website: GO HERE

You can order your copy of this book through your own favorite local independent bookstore, or you can find it online through multiple platforms,

TO ORDER ON AMAZON: GO HERE

TO CONTACT US:

Our email address: AITHpodcast@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AITHpodcast

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aithpodcast/

Or, follow us on Bluesky: @aithpodcast.bsky.social

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AITHpodcast

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

℗ All voice recordings copyright Peter Schmitz.

℗ All original music copyright Christopher Mark Colucci. Used by permission.

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories about the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz, and our original theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci. Join us, as we continue our Season Four: “The Rise of Modern Philadelphia Theater.”

[SEASON FOUR THEME]

In this episode I want to cover three new theatrical spaces that came to define non-profit  and educational Philadelphia theaters in the decade of the 1970s. One of them is by now quite familiar to all you long-time listeners of the podcast - the Walnut Street Theatre, which would both be restored and also be utterly transformed at this point in its long and prestigious history. The two other theaters were new structures entirely: the late ‘60s modernist bulk of Tomlinson and Randall Theaters at Temple University campus in North Philadelphia, and its even more ambitious counterpart the Annenberg Center on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia.

It’s been a while since I talked about Philadelphia theater in terms of the actual buildings that the plays take place in, but it’s necessary to do so, because by 1960 the ideas of early 20th century European theatrical innovators like Adolph Appia and Edward Gordon Craig - with their many leveled open thrust stages, enhanced by modern lighting and scenic effects, were rampant in the American theater world.

And the study and awareness of world theater history was becoming widespread in America too, I’m glad to say - directors and designers knew perfectly well that Ancient Greek performance areas were not proscenium arches, but were usually surrounded on three sides by the audience. New research into the structure of Elizabethan era playhouses, Japanese kabuki and Noh stages, and traditional Chinese opera were also intriguing theatermakers with ideas of stages that thrust into the audience and that dispensed with the raising and lowering of stage curtains. These new stages would bring actors into more direct contact with the audience, instead of always placing them within an artificial world framed by a traditional proscenium arch.

The first real progressive space in America was done by the young Orson Welles at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in 1937 where he staged Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for the WPA Theater Project with an added stage apron that reached way out into the house. By the 1950s the Anglo-Irish director Sir Tyrone Guthrie and the designer Tanya Mosiewitch had commissioned the first professional thrust stage built in North America at the Stratford Festival in Canada. And that pair would replicate this success in the next decade in Minneapolis Minnesota, with a stage that is now named after the iconic director  - the Guthrie Theatre.

Tyrone Guthrie also experimented with doing plays “in the round” - with the actors completely surrounded by the audience. Increasingly stages like these were becoming the norm in modern age theatrical practice. Either a thrust or an arena staging became all the rage as the non-profit regional theater movement spread across the country, and such stage configurations meshed well with modernist architectural principles which valued open sight lines, sleek glass, steel and concrete surfaces - and a general lack of ornamentation. Form followed function. As of 1968 Philadelphia had none of these spaces, although during the Circle in the Square company’s brief foray into Philadelphia in the early 1950s, they had left behind a simple wooden thrust stage inside the old ornate marble ballroom of the Academy of Music. That was the sort of stage that the TLA had tried to emulate when they converted that old movie theater on Philadelphia’s South Street.

But almost no completely new major theater had been built in central Philadelphia since the beginning of the Depression, a gap of almost four decades -  buildings with both a new stage structure inside and also a new exterior, ones whose forms broke ground with the past.

There is of course one notable exception: Playhouse in the Park - the surprisingly lovely poured concrete modernist version of a summer stock tent theater - which was set on a hilltop on the West Bank of the Schuylkill River in the late 1950s. But as we detailed in our Episode 53, as an institution Playhouse in the Park was losing its political support from politicians and audience support amongst local theatergoers, And both audiences and funding would begin to falter later in the 1970s. This was mostly due to the City of Philadelphia budget cuts - the performing arts are always an easy item for the chopping block in hard times. The city expected generous and charitable and local business owners to pick up the slack for the summer theater, which they did for a while, but eventually those funding sources began to die away, and after the 1979 Playhouse in the Park was closed. And remained closed for the next two decades, when it was finally demolished. Still, some amazing events and shows did still take place there before it all ended! I refer you to the chapter “The Show Rescued by a Helicopter” in my recent book.

Because the future, everyone thought, was not in summer tent shows or in commercial theater. Broadway and Broadway-type shows seemed to be dying, in the opinion of many theater cognoscenti and wealthy donors and cultural movers and shakers. Just as in the sport world there was a trend to replace traditional musty old baseball parks and football fields with enormous multipurpose stadiums with huge parking lots around them - like the cavernous (and largely unloved) Veterans Stadium which was rising in South Philly during those very years we’re talking about today - similarly, in the realm of High Culture there was a rush to build Arts Centers - huge complexes with multiple theaters and concert halls, usually all in one big enveloping building or gathered around a plaza with a big central fountain. The model for such ‘art centers’ was of course Lincoln Center, where in the mid-’60s New York City had erected a marble modernist masterpiece on the Upper West Side. Soon Washington DC was building the Kennedy Center along the Potomac, Los Angeles was creating the Mark Taper Forum, and so on. Now clearly the struggling Theatre of the Living Arts space on South Street was not getting anywhere with its initial vision to eventually deserve a huge new arts center of its own, so the question remained: where should Philadelphia build its own inevitable arts center? 

The answer was university campuses, most funders were advised by administrators and newspaper editorials that the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University were expanding  - and both of these campuses needed new theaters and classrooms, was the cry. And so the next big theaters to be built in the city of Philadelphia were intended to house university theater programs or to attract the kind of performing arts programming - ballet, modern dance, plays, concerts, film series - the cultured classes really dug. But as often happened in Philadelphia, the architects and funders of these would make some oddly conservative choices and safe compromises with these projects - decisions, as we shall see, that were going to have a profound effect on Philly theater productions for the next five decades.

Now, throughout North America, theater was now a standard subject in colleges and universities, and had been for half a century. Every major educational institution had a theater department - or almost every one - and although these theater departments were never to be supported like the athletics department, let me tell ya, university boards and presidents often took particular pride in showing them off to their friends and other board members.

Temple University in North Philadelphia was growing the fastest of all the major universities in the city in the 1960s. Founded as a working man’s night school in the late 19th century and then - under the leadership of Charles Ezra Beury - the brother of Joseph Beury the guy who owned the Walnut Street Theatre, remember - Temple was becoming a more traditional university by the 1920s and ‘30s with big stone buildings along the East side of Broad Street above Montgomery Ave., across from the huge bulk of the old Grand Opera House that we talked about way back in Episode 30. Temple had fraternities, athletic teams, all that. Stil, its tuition was quite low, and Temple’s enrollment boomed during the Great Depression as lots of ambitious young people from working class families or lower middle class families strove to better their lot. And Temple now had a law school, a pharmacy school, and teacher’s college, and a huge medical school and hospital. Its ambition was to rival and surpass the University of Pennsylvania, that grand old Ivy League private University that dated back to the city’s colonial era. By 1955 Temple had become a semi-public institution, and was shooting for an enrollment of 50,000 students. It was supported with a lot of money from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - and it was energetically expanding its campus’ footprint. This was aided by the plunging property values as the surrounding neighborhood became increasingly poor and black, as we discussed in Episode 48 when we talked about the history of the Metropolitan Opera House, which is a few blocks south of Temple’s campus. Though Temple had self-image and tried to project to the public that they were a friend to the middle and working classes of the city, this expansion did nothing to enhance it reputation among the mostly Black residents of North Philadelphia when - with the city’s blessing - it undertook what was then called “slum clearance” project in the blocks adjacent to its central campus - knocking down entire streets of apartments and houses along Diamond Street to build what was going to be a new jewel of the campus - its state-of-the-art modern theater and Arts Center.

Because Temple had a theater program, too - you’ll remember that the Broadway director Morton Da Costa was one of its most distinguished graduates, and his mentor Professor “Pop” Randall held sway there throughout the next four decades. Temple had a theater program that put on shows in Mitten Auditorium, often competing with the basketball team for space.

But now the administration had huge commitments of funds on hand from the wealthy publisher Walter Annenberg to create a School of Communications - and also another grant from the vice-president emeritus of Temple, William Tomlinson and his wife Rebecca to create specifically a new theater space. Overall the budget for this huge project was over 7 million dollars, and they wanted to create a modernist brick theater towering over an open park of green space - very different from the traditional setup of a Philadelphia block, but this was the architectural configuration that was so very typical of architecture in the Modernist Era. 

The auditorium would seat 481 in 17 steeply raked rows - configured so that the last person was still near the stage. It wasn’t really a thrust stage, though, interestingly, more of a modified proscenium. Sections of the audience areas could be closed off by moving wall dividers, to make it more intimate if required - though I must say in my experience the front rows of the Tomlinson’s awkward angles - looking up at the stage - rather discourage anyone at all to sit in them at all. There would be five dressing rooms, two of which accommodated 50 persons each - big enough for large cast student productions. And there was plenty for the tech and design programs too: ninety-foot flyspace could hold 23 rails of "flats" enough for more than one show at a time. And to build these huge shows, large costume, scenery, metalwork and carpentry shops were going to extend off the backstage area.

In fact, it was all the facilities - modern bells and whistles - the Temple faculty was really excited about - an orchestra pit on an elevator could be raised to stage level to build out the performing area, the latest lighting and sound equipment, trap doors in the stage, sound-directing acoustic ‘clouds’ over the audience and lots of catwalks and additional light rails above.

Work had moved swiftly, and the new theater was ready to host a trial production in the spring of 1968, before the theater was even officially opened. So: what did they decide to present in it? The drama faculty at Temple was pretty traditional in their approach to teaching theater, and to the disappointment of many students they chose not a modern play but a play that was cutting edge 50 years previously - The Scarecrow, it was called, an adaptation of a Nathaniel Hawthrone short story by Percy Mackaye - who often staged his plays down at the Plays & Players back in the Nineteen-teens and Twenties. When I saw this, I wasn’t clear why they would choose to go in this safe direction in the 1960s for such a new space, in an era when many of their own students were clearly more excited by the sort of repertoire and approach being championed by directors Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and Andre Gregory. A few years ago, when I posted about the inaugural of Tomlinson on Facebook, a follower of the page, the a man named Herb Moscovitz, chimed in to share a priceless and very 1960s story that explained about that production. I’ll read - verbatim - what he wrote:

I was a student at Temple when tRoland Vincent - L.S.D Partiehe Tomlinson Theater opened.  . . . THE SCARECROW was chosen because the story gave the Theater Department a chance to show off the latest theatrical technology the new theater boasted: latest lighting and sound equipment, trap doors, magical effects, etc. etc. etc.

I could write a book on the experiences of the tech crew on that show. I wish I had photos but alas, I don’t.

I had the good fortune to be prop master for the show. The prop list was very complex. Props needed were a Bible that an actor playing the devil could jump out of, the entire contents of a seventeenth century Massachusetts barn and a scarecrow that could be built on stage and then in full view of the audience turn into a live actor. I still have the carved styrofoam pumpkin head used for the prop. The scarecrow was left on stage overnight once, only lit by the ghost light , , , 

Some students brought hashish brownies to the theater and accidentally left them on the security guard’s desk. When the guard came on duty he thought the brownies were a gift and ate them. Later in the night he saw the scarecrow standing center stage . . . and he shot it. The shots were heard and other security guards stormed the theater. The first guard was screaming he had to shoot the scarecrow- it was coming right at him.

The guard was almost fired but the students who brought the brownies explained everything to his supervisor and there were apparently no consequences. I moved three years ago and while packing I came across that pumpkin head.

Wasn’t that a great story? Unfortunately Herb Moskowitz passed away last year and is no longer with us. I’m very happy that he honored us with that story -  because how else would I learn it? It sure wasn’t in the newspapers - apparently the Temple administration had hushed it all up. So hey, please folks - those of you with long memories of your own early years in Philadelphia theater - join in on the discussion on our Facebook page, or write us an email, don’t let these fantastic stories from your youth get lost!

In October of 1968 the Tomlinson Theater, presumably with the bullet holes backstage patched, was formally dedicated in a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, William and Rebecca Tomlinson were on hand of course, and a large full-length oil portrait of them was placed in the theater’s main lobby. Then they went to watch the Temple Theater Department’s production of Moliere’s Tartuffe. The title character was played by South Philly native and and then Temple student Albert Innaurato, later to become famous, after he spent a stint at Yale Drama School, as the playwright of that echt-Philly coming of age play that would last for so many years on Broadway: Gemini.

The next spring, behind the Tomlinson, a smaller black-box space named the Randall Theater - after the then retiring Professor Pop Randall - was inaugurated with a production of the George Abbott play Three Men on a Horse.

Fifty-six years later, those two theaters are still there. True, both these theaters are now appearing a bit dated and a little shabby, but it's because those two spaces have been put to heavy use over the years. Hundreds and hundreds of Temple University students, many of whom would become well-known actors, writers and designers in the Philly theater and entertainment world would perform on or design for those spaces - including John Connolly, James Ijames, Quinta Brunson, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Maggie Lakis, Maria Shaplin and Colman Domingo. And this whole Temple complex gives us a classic example of the pattern in years to come for most newly-constructed performance venues in repertory theaters and universities across Philly, and around the country: one large space - usually a thrust or a proscenium stage, for big shows - and next to it or downstairs a smaller black box theater, in which the audience and stage configuration could be modified for more intimate and experimental plays. 

Just a few weeks ago, by the way, Temple University announced - finally - that they were starting construction next spring in 2025 on a beautiful new theater and classroom complex, over on the West side of N. Broad Street - right on top of the empty lot that was once occupied by headstones and graves of the enormous 19th Century Monument Cemetery - now all the bodies have been moved, we think, say most folks, with a little shudder. Well, we’ll see what they find when they start digging.

Although to my mind, of course, that’s not so bad, and anyway this new arrival will finally put to rest the ghost of another former longtime resident of that stretch of Broad Street - the 1888 Grand Opera House that once stood down the block, whose last remnants disappeared only in 1988, as well the long-gone Liberty Theatre that also once stood just a little bit to the south nearby, where vaudevillians such as Mae West once sang and shimmied. You know, forget the buried bodies. Those are the kind of ghosts that I tend to think about and talk about all the time, anyway - as I often mordantly remark to people unlucky enough to walk down any Philly street with me: “I see dead theaters.”

At the same time that Temple was building its complex of buildings for the Annenberg School of Communications with the Tomlinson and Randall Theaters insided in North Philadelphia, its much wealthier and more prestigious educational rival in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, was also using Annenberg money to rebuild its campus a few miles away in West Philadelphia.

I should explain at this point that the billionaire Walter Annenberg and his second wife Leoonore. They were a major donor to arts organizations back then, and to theaters and museums - not only in Philadelphia but across the country. Annenberg, who had briefly attended the Wharton School of Business at Penn, inherited as a young man ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily Racing Form that his father, Moses Annenberg, had acquired. By the 1940s Walter was running the show. He was continuing to run the Inquirer as a reliably conservative paper, and he folded it and the Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid, into a larger publishing company called Triangle Communications. 

During the 1950s Annenberg, spotting the direction popular culture was going, founded Seventeen magazine. He also began buying up television and radio stations, not just in Philly, but across the country. His station WFIL, located in West Philly not far from the Penn campus started the hugely popular afternoon show American Bandstand in 1952. In 1953 Annenberg bought up the small publication TV Guide and turned it into a national publication powerhouse. For those of you that remember that period, TV Guide was a ubiquitous publication, sitting on coffee tables and television consoles in almost every American household. TV Guide listed all the TV shows in the local area, as well as doing features on stars. You could subscribe to it, or pick it up at the supermarket aisle for just 15 cents. It bulged with ads and soon was bringing in Annenberg a million dollars a week - and this was on top of all he was raking in from his other publications and local TV stations. He had a huge mansion in the Main Line suburb of Wynnewood Pennsylvania as well as an even bigger place out in California  near Palm Springs.

By 1968 Annenberg was 60 years old, and was beginning to draw back from the day-to-day running of the business and all the institutions of which he was on the Board of Trustees, like Temple and Penn. He was a fervent supporter of Richard Nixon for President in 1968, and was rewarded when Nixon was elected by being appointed the American Ambassador to Great Britain. As he left for London, he sold the Inquirer and the Daily News to the Knight-Ridder chain, and Leonore were liberally sharing their vast fortune and adding their names to institutions they cared about, and these included Philadelphia performing arts. And when his fellow Penn Trustee - a guy named Harold Zellerbach, a graduate of the Wharton School who ran the huge California lumber and paper conglomerate Crown Zellerbach Corporation, told Annenberg that he wanted to donate half a million bucks to Penn for a new theater - and ANOTHER prominent Penn alum, the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince said well heck he’d chip in too, well then the capital was suddenly there for a Grand Philadelphia Center for the Arts. Just like Lincoln Center in New York - far away from tawdry old Times Square - this new 5.7 million dollar Annenberg Center for the Arts was gonna be far away from the former heart of the former Philly theater district - the new action was going to be two miles to the west, across the Schuylkill River. A clean start for a clean new era.

The Annenberg Center was under construction - starting in ‘68 - for the next three years, as the University of Pennsylvania knocked down several blocks of old brownstone buildings, expanding and modernizing its campus. The architect of the Annenberg Center was Vincent  Kling, one of the most prominent architects in Philadelphia at the time, and certainly one of the most prolific - he designed such other prominent buildings as the multiple Penn Center Office towers to the west of City Hall and the ‘brutalist’ United States Mint on Arch Street. He also designed my two sons’ high school building out in the suburbs. So, I’ve had plenty of time to study Vincent Kling’s aesthetic. Now I am not an architecture critic, and everything that follows is just my personal opinion. In fact, I’m gonna tread carefully, because I have gotten my head handed to me on social media not too long ago for some unwise aspersions I cast upon the work of the sainted Philly architect Louis Kahn. You know, I really need to get someone knowledgeable, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural writer Inga Saffron, onto this podcast sometime, if she would be so unwise - I mean, if she would be so kind - to agree to do such a thing.

But, you know, I do have long experience as a theatergoer and a theater artist . .  and I guess a little as a theater historian. So, here's my main thought about the Annenberg Center, as it turned out. When you look at its overall plan, is a beautifully constructed series of geometric shapes all   . .  Theater is a public-facing activity, by definition, and like a lot of mid 20th Century modernist architecture the Annenberg Center doesn’t relate to the public street. I think this is a prime element for a theater to have - invite people in, make and obvious vibrant streetscape - include views of the exciting interior activity, include spaces for cafes and shops and make the public want to walk into the entrance space. Instead Kling’s Annenberg presented a three-story blank brick wall, stretching for hundreds of feet to passersby on West Walnut Street, interrupted only by one slot of a dark glass entrance door to the lower level. The main entrances are really on the sides, up a series of steps and ramps. This leads you into a grand open atrium area with ochre-colored carpets, an abstract sculpture and chandeliers and a nice box office area - which I admit is really nice. The craftsmanship is top quality and details of construction are clear and clean. The public restrooms are really spacious and nice, by the way - full marks for them. But the overall vibe in the Annenberg is more of a four-star hotel than the gritty - sometimes even uncomfortable and grimy - details that can make a theater a vibrant place for artists to work - ones that tie it to the surrounding community, and don’t hermetically seal itself off from it.

Okay so back to the historical narrative: there are two main theaters there - the showpiece is the Zellerbach, which seats 960 people. It is a proscenium space, very wide with the classic acoustic clouds. The oval main orchestra seating area comes to an elegant rounded point at the lip of the stage. There is a balcony section in the Zellerbach which completes the oval of the orchestra floor, but again very wide. Energy coming from performers on the stage needs to be very bright and powerful to fill up all that space. Downstairs there is a black box space - this is the Harold Prince Theatre, seating about 200 on moveable risers. There are other smaller theaters, rehearsal spaces and faculty offices on the upper level.

On April 27th, 1971, the Annenberg Center finally opened. There had been some changes of leadership over that period - Richard Kirschner was the head of the whole organization at that point. President Nixon wrote a letter to send his congratulations to all those who were present for the gala occasion. Naturally among the attendees was Walter Annenberg himself, who had come back from the UK for the occasion. Nancy Hanks, who was then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was there too, and welcomed the crowd - or rather, the clump of folks in the audience. Embarrassingly, whoever was doing the publicity for that big gala opening,had really not done their job . . I don’t know  . .  because according to press accounts the auditorium of the Zellerbach was only half full.

Maybe it was the choice of material being presented? Because amazingly, just as had happened at the TLA with their first production, all this well-marshalled resources of American capitalism sent to fund the American theater arts had started with a Brecht play - and not just any Brecht play - not even a well-known one, not Galileo, not Threepenny Opera, no . . they had chosen a new translation of the little known 1928 work St. Joan of the Stockyards, a full-out attack on Capitalism, a play which does G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara one better by giving us a title character from the Salvation Army confronting a titan of industry - not an arms manufacturer in this case, but a guy trying to corner the market in Chicago for raw meat.

And the  other thing that was interesting was that Kirschner had not even attempted to use Philadelphia theater artists or Penn students for the play - instead he had recruited some really top quality and talented Off-Broadway actors from New York, under the direction of a New York director, Dennis Rosa. The actress Laura Esterman played the title character of Joan Dark and Richard Ramos was the Meat King, J. Pierpont Mauler. Neil Vipond played Mauler’s henchman Mr. Slift, leading a cast of several dozen other actors in a very large and talented ensemble. There was a huge and complex Constructivist style set designed by Robert Mitchell complete with moving platforms  - indeed the Annenberg Center had recruited a whole crew of experienced stagehands from the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis just to operate it.

Unfortunately, reviews from the Philadelphia press were savage - reading over them in the archives I can see that Wiiliam Collins in the Inquirer clearly didn’t really care for Bertolt Brecht at all - he hated this play in particular. Though he was wowed by the production’s scenic effects, he felt that Brecht’s demonstrations of the evils of capitalism in the text were “never so didactic as they were here.”

Newsweek
magazine’s regular theater critic Jack Kroll came down from New York to Philly just for the occasion, and we should note that he raved about the “moonshot” production, he just loved it - “astonishing” he termed it, and encouraged every reader to run and see it during its brief two-week run. But Kroll did have one big criticism for the Annenberg’s staff - the half empty house on opening night was “one of the most shamefully inept jobs of management and public relations in the tragicomic history of culture centers.”

In the Daily Pennsylvanian, the university’s student newspaper, the undergraduate writer Mark Rosenball allowed that it was all very impressive. But he noted that this whole Annenberg Center project, as far as he could see, was adding nothing to the lives of the most natural constituents for it: the students. Penn had no Drama Department, after all. They had thought about forming one in the 1920s, but they decided not and there were no plans to form one now. He wrote: “All the official inaugural production of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and ‘St. Joan of the Stockyards’ serves to demonstrate [is] that much can be done with the resources of the Center, especially if they are utilized by those who are most competent to do so, i.e. the professionals who produced ‘St. Joan’ and for whom the center was basically intended.”

The truth was no one really seemed to know what to do now with the shiny new complex, the administrators’ plans for the center were a bit vague, honestly. Maybe book some big name singers, dance companies. And you know, perhaps looking at the sad remains of the TLA across town, Richard Kirschner - the leader of the center - had explicitly rejected ever forming a resident repertory theater company for the Annenberg. That was right out. So, again, nothing that invested in the building for the long-term future of the local arts scene, and very little that drew upon or developed the talents of Penn students. They had their own undergraduate theater clubs, like the Mask and Wig, after all. They could go play over there. The Annerberg was to exist on the Penn campus as a ‘cultural resource,’ but really only for the middle class suburban audience whom its programming was meant to appeal to. Students could come watch it too, of course, if they wanted. But even two years later, I note in an article by Steven Winn in the Daily Pennsylvanian from February of 1973, the sort of anti-Annenberg Center sentiment amongst the Penn undergrads had not changed. As he wrote: “What remains clear is that Penn’s Annenberg Center has philosophically directed itself away from the student as a member of the artistic community and branded him as a consumer.

Which brings us to the third Philadelphia theater built during this era - the Walnut Street Theatre. Now I know, we have documented continually on this podcast that some form of the building of the Walnut Street Theater had existed on the corner of 9th and Walnut for a long time. But we know that most of the old fabric of the original building was dismantled and discarded in 1920, and I’m here to tell you that the Walnut Street Theatre in the physical form it has today, really dates from the early 1970s. And the fact that anything still exists at all is due to another philanthropic family - not the Annenbergs and not the Shuberts, because you may remember there was some sentiment among them for pulling the old place down entirely, but instead it was the Haas Family, who had earned their fortune from Philadelphia’s enormous Rohm and Haas Chemical Corporation. The Haas Family Foundation, along with others in the Philadelphia philanthropic community, really saved the Walnut, and it was they who were to be the philanthropic wellspring of the revival and growth of the Philadelphia theater community from that point onward. Anyway, for our purposes today, at long last, the Shubert Family’s ownership of the theater was coming to an end. It too was about to become an Arts Center:

Now to illustrate this, I’m going to read here from Andrew Davis’ great book about the Walnut Street Theater entitled America’s Longest Run, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2010: This is how Davis describes the transition that took place between the years 1968 and 1970 in sections of the book entitled “The Shuberts’ Last Season” and then one entitled “Restoration”:

[TEXT from Davis book NOT TRANSCRIBED]

All right . . so, now it was three years later. October 16-17, 1971: After a two-year reconstruction and restoration project, the historic Walnut Street Theater was opened to the public. Just like the Annenbergs, the Haas’ also wanted to have a gala opening.

Marlene Dietrich had originally been scheduled to appear for the occasion, but had bowed out of performing at the gala event, for reasons that were unclear. So instead another movie star of a bygone era, Lillian Gish, was the first performer to inaugurate the space.

There was no show, so instead the entire space was open for public inspection on the 16th. The crowd all entered through the Walnut's new entrance - a foyer in the base of an adjacent office building which was now incorporated into the overall structure.

According to an article by William Collins in the Inquirer:
_____________________

An invited crowd of nearly 1,000 friends and patrons participated in an unusual 'walk-through' to see what loving hands and close to $3 million had wrought on the showplace at 9th and Walnut sts. which was first opened in 1809 as an indoor circus.

What they saw was an impressively handsome job of restoration on the outside and a marvel of reconstruction on the inside.

During an informal kickoff ceremony on the stage, a surprise appearance was made by Lillian Gish, [the] silent film star whose film-lecture on the days of the silents will be one of the weekend's opening attractions on Sunday night.

Miss Gish asked "all the ghosts of the past – perhaps they're here tonight – to bless this theater."

Mrs. F. Otto Haas, vice president of the theater corporation, gave a message of thanks to everyone who had worked to make the renovation a reality. And she concluded, "What happens to the Walnut Street Theater is now up to the people of Philadelphia."
________________________

So there we are. What was different about the Walnut, to my mind, although in essence it too was now a mid-century Arts Center - but instead of avoiding the community and the life on the street it welcomed it - its old facade proudly advertised and announced its existence and purpose. 

This, I think, is why the Walnut is still regarded with affection and considerable civic pride in Philadelphia - in a way that the Annenberg and the Tomlinson Theater just never would be.

We will continue with the story of the Walnut Street Theatre - and the Annenberg Center - when we tell the story of the Philadelphia Drama Guild in the 1970s and 80s - That will be in January in 2025. I’ve got so many great interviews and shows lined up for you good folks for the next few months. Have a wonderful holiday season - there’s no Adventures in Theater History Holiday Show this year  - but I promise to give you all a New Year's Day treat with a special Encore Episode from our archive of previous shows.

Oh and I should mention that not only has the Walnut Street theater recently undergone a fresh renovations, but that the Annenberg Center has announced plans too for a rebuilding of its structure - from what I can tell, from what I can see on the website they’re going to strip away a lot of the brick walls, install a lot of glass and open the lobby area up to the community and the street - and add a new venue that really ties it to the Penn campus and the students there, it looks fantastic. 

So, as Philadelphia’s own group McFadden and Whitehead remind us, there’s no stopping us now, folks , we are well and truly launched on this saga of modern Philadelphia theater. I will see you all in the New Year. Keep the faith, and keep your courage up - it’s likely we’ll all need it.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t gotten a copy already, look for Adventures in Theater History, Philadelphia - the book! Go ask for it now at your local independent bookstore, or order it online wherever fine books are sold. If you enjoy it - remember to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads so other good folks can learn about it, too. Support us on Patreon - the links are in the show notes. Or, leave a review about the show on Apple Podcasts.

And, as I should add, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads or Bluesky.. Our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com write us, and let us know what you think - or like the late great Herb Moskovitz share a special story from Philly theater history that I may not know, but needs to be heard! There is - or there will be soon, anyway - a blog post for this episode on our website, www.aithpodcast.com, with images of all the theaters that we have talked about today. Thank you for listening to us throughout the year 2024, and for looking forward with us to the year 2005, and for joining us on yet another adventure in Theater History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]