30. The Best of Times

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

[OPENING THEME]

Welcome, welcome and welcome once again to Adventures in Theater History. With this episode we attempt to wrap up the first season of our show, covering the overall narrative of Philadelphia theater history from its beginnings to the end of the 19th Century. We will dive into the 20th Century next season.

It has been our position ever since we began this podcast that the Nineteenth Century is essential to understanding the story of Philadelphia, in whatever aspect you care to look at it. During the city’s downturn (during the middle of the Twentieth Century), of course, a great deal of effort was expended emphasizing and publicizing and marketing the stories from Philadelphia’s 18th Century - the Quakers, Benjamin Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, Betsy Ross, all that stuff. And during the 20th Century, an appalling amount of Philadelphia's 19th Century physical fabric was literally torn down and cleared away, in fact, so that the remaining 18th Century buildings in the city could be better featured and preserved, and sometimes just that so replicas of 18th Century buildings could be put back, as it were. And as we shall see, a heartbreaking number of Philadelphia’s 19th Century theaters, in particular, were torn down only to be replaced by highways and parking lots — so that 20th Century Americans could drive their 20th Century cars to see those 18th Century historic sites with convenience. 

Now obviously, I joke, like many historians I have my favorite periods to study from the past and I’ve always been a 19th century man, frankly. I have absolutely nothing against the 18th Century, mind you. Perfectly fine historical period, if you like that sort of thing. . .  But a terrible century for theater around here, frankly, for reasons we discussed way back in Episode Number Two. And as we continue into the next portion of our narrative, what’s coming up is going to be absolutely great, too — I promise not to sell the 20th Century short, for goodness sake. As for the 21st Century . . . well perhaps it's too soon too soon to say, but I must admit that lately it has not been doing a very good job of making a great case for itself, has it? Shape up, 21st Century. I mean, come on.

But let’s start our journey for today. I’m going to begin at about 1876 and generally talk about the last quarter of the 19th Century. Along the way I’ll be sharing with you a number of vignettes — many of them stories that I’ve already featured on our Facebook page, by the way, where I often try out material for the podcast first. So, you know, follow us there, or on Twitter, and you’ll get a daily dose of Philadelphia Theater History, in nice little bites. But here on the podcast of course we go for the broad sweep. Okay, enough of this prelude, let’s head back, once more, into 19th century Philadelphia .  Here we go . . 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

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What we need to do first is to acknowledge that unlike the impression I’ve often left you with so far, there were other theaters in the city of Philadelphia besides the Walnut Street Theatre, the Chestnut Street Theater, the Arch Street Theatre and the Academy of Music. As the city of Philadelphia boomed during the entire century, the demand for entertainment kept pace. And the number of Philadelphia theaters continued to grow. Many of these theaters catered to specific populations of newly arrived immigrants.

For example, the "City Museum" was converted from a former church at 415 Callowhill Street in what had formerly been the independent borough of Northern Liberties, along the Old York Road, the major highway north of Philadelphia, leading to Trenton and New York City.

In 1854, as the consolidation of every municipality in the entirety of Philadelphia County went on, the City Museum was located in a heavily German immigrant working class neighborhood. The 'museum' had a 'lecture room', which exhibited Shakespeare plays, melodramas, and variety performances. So, you know, a theater.

By 1860 it was a beer garden called the Melodeon, and the stage inside it was used for musical acts. Renamed thereafter the "Atlantic Garden Theatre", it experienced a fire in 1868, and then it was rebuilt. Now called The Concordia, it featured German language drama and vaudeville. Now, as the neighborhood changed it shifted to English language drama, it became an English language theater, the American Theatre in 1887, and the Thalia in 1889. That sort of thing went on all the time, you have to keep track of a lot of name changes as time goes along.

In 1890 the theater was closed and the entire building was swallowed up by an industrial complex, becoming literally incorporated into the Betz Brewery. I mean, not torn down and replaced, the brewery just . . ate it.  It became just a little part of the huge manufacturing and commercial empire of John F. Betz, at that point one of the richest men in the city. On the stage of the  Museum/Atlantic Garden/American Theatre/Thalia where actors had once held forth, huge barrels of beer were now stored and measured and shipped.

Not that John F. Betz was against the performing arts himself, no no in fact, he wanted to bring the benefits of German culture to Philadelphia. He just wanted to make money doing it, like he did with everything else. Before the year he swallowed up the Thalia, in fact, he had already financed and constructed its replacement.

Built in 1888 at the southeast corner of Montgomery and Broad Street in North Philadelphia, the Grand Opera was the fourth-largest theater building ever constructed in the city. Betz had big dreams for this place, which is why the first production staged there was Wagner's Tannhauser! Though in later years it tended to host lighter musicals and spectacles and eventually became a variety house, the Grand Opera took up almost an entire city block and dozens of huge bay windows paraded down its length on all sides. The audience area had a capacity of over 3000 people. The proscenium opening was 58 feet wide, and from the footlights to the back wall was 60 feet. In fact a notice posted backstage warned actors and singers not to get lost in its depths, since: " . . the distance from the center of this stage to the wings is probably greater than that of any theatre in which you have previously appeared . . "  

But the Grand Opera on Broad St. was not even the first opera house in the city to challenge the Academy of Music’s primacy in opera by using that title. In 1870 the architect Edwin Forrest Durang, grandson of our old friend the dancer John Durang and son of the theater historian Charles Durang, had received one of his first major architectural commissions: the Arch Street Opera House, and for it he designed a lovely High Victorian structure near 10th Street with three tall latticed windows on its facade and room inside for about a thousand patrons in an auditorium with curving decorated tiers of balconies. 

But the Arch Street Opera House suffered a fire very soon - in 1872 - and Durang’s original conception was rebuilt and remodeled somewhat several times. But unlike the Grand Opera on Broad Street and like most 'opera houses' of the 19th century, it never really hosted opera. Instead, over the years, it held minstrel shows, stock theater companies, Shakespeare, Yiddish theater, burlesque, and by the 1970s Chinese action movies. It has gone, over the years, by dozens of names: Simon & Slocum's, Sweatman's, Park Theatre, New Arch Street Opera House, Continental Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Casino Theatre . . . and finally The Trocadero or The Troc. For many years it was a notorious strip joint, and then in the very late 20th Century it became a concert hall. In fact, unlike almost every theater I’m going to talk about for the rest of the episode today, as of this writing, though presently unoccupied, it’s still there! Let’s hope it will still stand for many years to come.

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]

Amongst Philadelphia historians it's safe to say the Great Exposition of 1876 is seen as a major turning point, when the city celebrated the 100th Anniversary of its role in the founding of the United States with an enormous World’s Fair that blanketed Fairmount Park in West Philadelphia. It was the signal for the beginning of America’s dominance in world industrial and technological growth, as the huge Corliss steam engine that powered everything else in the park whirled away at its center. People from everywhere in the country came to see it, taking special trains on the railroad tracks that now snaked from everywhere else to Philadelphia. And between May and November of that year - 1876-  nine million people had visited the fairgrounds.

Also built in 1876 to attract some of these visitors, Kiralfy's Alhambra Palace was thrown up in the middle of town, on Broad Street, in between Locust and Spruce, directly across from the Academy of Music. The architect was Frank H. Loenholdt, under contract for the flamboyant Hungarian-born theatrical producers Bolossy and Imre Kiralfy. The Alhambra’s stage hosted the Kiralfy Brother’s spectacular show Around the World in 80 Days, a musical extravaganza based on the Jules Verne novel. Next to the theater the brothers constructed an outdoor Moorish garden, with sculptures, lights, balconies, and rock formations and an amphitheater that held additional musical and dance performances. Unfortunately, that summer of 1876 was extremely hot, and few of the crowds out at the fairgrounds really wanted to venture into the steaming city on most evenings and go see a show. And by the end of that year, the Kiralfy Brothers gave up the Alhambra theater, and moved their future operations to New York City from then on. 

After the Exposition was over, under new ownership it was rebuilt and renamed the Broad Street Theatre - by the longstanding Philadelphia tradition that a theater needs to be known by the names of the streets that it’s on. Though it retained its startling Moorish design, challenging the more restrained German architecture of the Academy across the way for decades. And although its elaborate interior made for problematic audience sight lines, the Broad Street Theatre nonetheless was regarded, over the next fifty years, as the premiere theatrical spaces in the city, hosting performances by Edwin Booth, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Russell, Ethel Barrymore, and many many others.

Speaking of ‘hot’ spots in the city, Fox’s American Theatre, a 1600-seat auditorium now occupying the old location of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Chestnut Street between 10th and 11th, was certainly a ‘hot’ spot for single gentlemen. Variety shows of a more risque nature dominated that stage, just the sort of thing that was playing in many temporary performance venues near the Exposition itself. In 1877, as we noted back in Episode 12, Fox’s American Theatre became a very hot spot indeed, catching fire and suffering a great deal of damage. It was rebuilt in 1878 and began calling itself the Chestnut Street Opera House (that flexible term once again), now hosting musical comedies and somewhat more respectable fare than previously, and a sign on its facade placed by its manager George Goodwin insisted that it was now a “Family Resort.”

George Goodwin, was also the manager of Walnut Street Theatre, by the way, and tried to attract crowds away from the Exposition to that old house too, hoping to capitalize on its relative proximity to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. On the Fourth of July, the streets around the theater were indeed packed with people and the air in the evenings was full of the sound of fireworks. It was on this patriotic occasion that the Walnut Street Theatre first began to market itself not only as the oldest theater in the city but as “The Oldest In America”, a slogan that would remain emblazoned on its facade for many years thereafter and on many marketing campaigns ever since. Whether that claim was true or not (and it mostly is), the historical interest it generated in 1876 was apparently not enough to draw crowds inside. Even the appeal of seeing well-known comic actor E.A. Sothern, as he played the character of the silly aristocrat Lord Dundreary (with his famous enormous side whiskers) in the play Our American Cousin at the Walnut Street Theatre was not enough. And when crowds failed to appear, during the heat of that July, Southern ‘fell ill’ and abandoned the run of the show. Tony Pastor instead arrived from New York to fill in the rest of the summer with his vaudeville troupe instead.

In November 1876, as the Exposition finally closed and the weather cooled considerably, the Walnut had more success with the burlesque Edward Rice musical Evangeline, perhaps one of the first full-length musicals ever written, whose book was loosely based on the Longfellow poem about French Acadians expelled from Canada. It wasn’t all sad - the production also featured a dancing heifer, an amorous whale, and a lone fisherman who wandered wordlessly around the stage carrying his telescope. For the occasion, a patriotic song was added to the show’s score, accompanied by a swirling display of American flags. The musical, which was built rather along the lines of a musical review at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club was somewhat charmingly ‘idiotic’, reported the Philadelphia Times, but the paper allowed that the songs were good and the stage business was very funny.

While researching this production, I was delighted to discover that just a few years ago the Orchestra of The Longfellow Chorus in Portland Maine, had both performed and made a simply wonderfully staged and exquisitely performed recording of a recreated score of Evangeline. In fact we have been using small snippets of the score as transition and background music already throughout this episode. And right now, I am thrilled to present to you the voices of the singers Cree Carrico and Kaitlyn Costello along with the Orchestra of the Longfellow Chorus, under conductor Charles Kaufmann, singing the Centennial number ‘100 Years Ago’. 

In 1876 the city's population stood at 817,000 people, and over the next 25 years the number of Philadelphians would grow to 1.3 million, the third largest urban population in the US. It was still the largest, if you just measure its area, by the amount of ground it took up. Block after block of houses and apartments were thrown up as the city’s street grid expanded throughout the enormous area of Philadelphia County. Soon there was almost no undeveloped or open land left in many parts of town, especially the broad plains of South Philadelphia or in the rolling hills of West and Northwest Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River. Though it’s true people tended to have large families then, a great portion of the growth came from. immigrants, still mostly Irish and German, but soon there were more immigrants as the century went from Eastern Europe, from Southern Europe, from Italy, from Poland, and there was internal migration, mostly African American coming up from the South.

After the buzz of the Centennial was over, well, the hangover began. The 1877-78 season was the worst financially for Philadelphia’s theaters since the end of the Civil War. Indeed it was a bad time for American theater generally. Road companies found themselves stranded all over the country, abandoned by their managers who hadn’t gotten enough at the box office to pay the train fare. And even the resident stock companies like those of the Arch Street Theatre were being let go. Louisa Lane Drew sadly dismissed her regular acting company in 1878, as did John Sleeper Clarke at the Walnut Street in 1879. Most of these actors moved to New York City which was the place to be when the national touring companies started booking again.

There was one of the few resident stock companies left in the city at the grand Chestnut Street Theatre (also known as Haverly’s), which was in a more fashionable district for playgoers than the increasingly dowdy old Walnut and Arch Street houses over to the east. But there was drama of many kinds there. On January 19th, 1880 the author Sydney Rosenfeld’s play Dr. Clyde was in its fourth and final week of performances, and its excitable author was reluctant to see it end. A light comedy that Rosenfeld had freely adapted from an older German text, it had already been performed in Chicago, San Francisco, and at New York's Fifth Avenue Theatre the previous year.

Sydney Rosenfeld, then twenty-five years old, was convinced his moment of theatrical eminence had arrived. Throughout the Philadelphia run, the excitable playwright had attended every show, moving about the house during performances, sitting in the private boxes, talking to audience members, giving the actors of the company additional notes afterwards, and generally being a nuisance. When he felt that manager William Gemmill's ads in the Philadelphia papers were inadequate, he placed his own lengthy notices in the 'Amusements' sections of the paper, right alongside.

He had not only booked another theater in Philadelphia to hold a special performance of his show - with a combination of the Philadelphia and New York casts - but had also insisted on hosting a gala dinner for his friends on the stage of the Chestnut Street Theatre after an evening performance. Quite a presumption! Gemmill, deep in preparations for his long-awaited starring role as Hamlet the next week, refused permission for this dinner, though Rosenfeld pretended that he had and showed up with all his friends and fully prepared dinner anyway.

Gemmill, exasperated, banned Rosenfeld from the theater. The author showed up anyway, bought a ticket at the box office to gain admittance, and then ran to the manager's office to berate him for this outrage. Gemmill called the police and had him arrested. Rosenfeld was seized and led by the officers out the front door, and as he went he yelled "MURDER!" to all the astounded patrons in the lobby coming in to see the show. The police marched him out the front door down Chestnut street and straight to a police court. But once he was hauled before the magistrate, Rosenfeld welcomed the opportunity to tell his story in court and the gathered reporters at great length. He even brought charges of assault and battery against Gemmill.

The magistrate patiently heard the long-winded explanation from the playwright of how he had been wronged, and then dismissed all charges. But the proceedings were fully reported in the newspapers, which was perhaps Rosenfeld's intention. The playwright continued to attend every remaining performance of Dr. Clyde until the run ended at the end of the week, and apparently Gemmell thereafter simply ignored his presence, waiting for the welcome day when Rosenfeld's extended siege of the premises would end.

William Gemmill's Hamlet was indeed staged at the Chestnut Street Theatre the following week. Notices were generally approving, but it proved to be the peak of the 40 year-old actor's career. Eventually he left the Chestnut, exhausted by the duties involved of both acting and management - including taking care of high-maintenance playwrights, presumably.

Oh but you remember the special performance of Dr. Clyde that Rosenfeld scheduled the following week at Wood's Museum - nearby, north of Market Street? It never came off, when the company actors whose appearance he had confidently advertised completely failed to show up - in fact, it seems that Gemmill had paid them not to come! (Hamlet always plays the long game, and gets his revenge in the end.)

But Rosenfeld, undaunted, just stood up and gave an extended speech to his friends and supporters who had assembled. The regular company at Woods Museum obligingly put on their own show for those few audience members who remained.
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Let’s spend some time looking at just that one month, January of 1880, of this period in Philadelphia theater history, because it gives us a nice snapshot of the era. In that month Franz Von Suppe's comic opera Fatinitza, produced by the H.B. Mahn's Comic Opera Company of Boston continued its successful run at Mrs. John Drew's Arch Street Theatre. The company had already brought the show to Philadelphia the previous year, and was back again for a return engagement. For her part, Mrs. Drew, who no longer had her own resident company to look after, was happy to book any touring combination whose receipts might keep her shareholders happy. 

Fortunately for her, Fatinitza with it exotic settings and fashionable music proved to have maintained their popularity. "It was a right jolly welcome that Mahn's Comic Opera Company had at the Arch Street Theatre last night," reported the Inquirer. "There was not a vacant seat and scarcely any standing room in the house, and when the curtain rose upon the Russian encampment on the Danube the audience was quick to greet the appearance of all the members of the old Fatinitza cast with hearty applause. . . after the famous quartette in the first act a mammoth basket of flowers was handed over the footlights and borne away by the dashing Vladimir.  . . Fatinitza has not lost its popularity, and certainly the opera has never had a more thoroughly satisfactory performance in this city."

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In that same month we’ve already been discussing so much, January 1880: Imre and Bolossy Kiralfy came back! The old perennial producers of new theatrical spectacle,  brought the show Enchantment to the Walnut Street Theatre. 

As was usual with the Kiralfy Brothers shows, no expense was spared, either onstage or off. In the "Land of the Ephemerals" musical number, fifty beautiful women were suspended in the air, like magical spirits skimming across the surface of a lushly verdant lagoon.

An almost full-page ad for the show was taken out in the "Amusements" theatrical listing of the Philadelphia Times, with the eye-catching graphic effect of each huge letter of the title being spelled by smaller letters from the typesetter’s stock. Other competing shows in the Philadelphia theater world that months, such as Dr. Clyde at the Chestnut, and Carncross' Minstrels, were left to post their own competing ads with smaller type-setting tricks, but nothing could match the Kiralfy's extravagance. Perhaps as a result of the overwhelming advertising blitz, the show at the Walnut was packed every night of its run.

And the reviewers were enchanted, too. "Enchantment is like all of the successful spectacular dramas that have preceded it," reported The Times. "Everything that the public like being lugged in somehow or other, but the old features generally wear a new aspect, and there are many things in it that are new. The scenic effects are very fine, the scenic artists' . . . ingenuity having been taxed to the utmost to carry out the ideas of the Messers. Kiralfy. The scenes in the Land of the Ephemerals, where all created things are supposed to have an existence only twelve hours in the duration, are wonderfully striking. Before the eyes of the audience the bare limbs of the trees put forth their buds, develop full foliage and fall into 'the sere and yellow leaf' of autumn, a house is gradually covered in ivy and its roof acquires the moss that comes with age, and the swift passage of the Ephemerals from period of life to another in the course of a few hours  . . .."

In the years after 1880, the management of Philadelphia’s major theaters began to consolidate in a manner that was to have great implications for the long term future of American show business. J. Fred Zimmerman, had started out as a 20 year-old usher at the new Chestnut Street Theater in 1863 - over the next two decades he had slowly been building his career, working in the box office and then becoming a booking agent for touring shows. He went into partnership with Samuel F. Nirdlinger, who for business purposes went by ‘Samuel Nixon’. Together the two men formed  the Nixon and Zimmerman theatrical firm, and bought the lease for Chestnut Street Theatre as William Gemmil exited the scene. 

In 1882 George Goodwin died, and his widow sold Nixon and Zimmerman the leases to both the Walnut Street Theatre and the Chestnut Street Opera House. Soon they would acquire the Broad Street Theatre as well. Now in control of all four major theater spaces in Philadelphia they began buying up theaters elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. The roots of the future Theatrical Syndicate were beginning to take shape.

September 16, 1884: Ada Rehan and John Drew, Jr. appear at the Chestnut Street Opera House in Augustin Daly's new comedy Dollars & Sense.

Daly's famous troupe of New York actors had just returned from a successful run in London, and had made Philadelphia their first stop after their return to America. It was also a return to Philadelphia for two of the company. John Drew, Jr. who had grown up in the city, where his mother, Mrs. John Drew, had run the Arch Street Theatre for many years. But after getting his start in his mother's theater, he had gone off to New York to become a leading actor in Daly's, and was now an established star.

But his fame was not as big as his co-star, Ada Rehan. Rehan had also gotten her start, and her name, at the Arch Street Theatre. Born "Ada Crehan" in Ireland, she had immigrated to America as a girl and followed two of her sisters onto the stage. She had joined Mrs. Drew's stock company. On her first appearance her name was mistakenly printed as "Ada C. Rehan", and Mrs. Drew advised her well, to keep it. She did, and after she too left for New York, Rehan went on to become one of the most well-known actresses of her age, acting with Daly's troupe in dozens of productions (as well as becoming his longtime mistress).

Comedies like Dollars & Sense could always be counted on to attract a crowd of theatergoers looking for a night of fun in Philadelphia. Not that nobody tried to stage serious drama, of course. We’ve already detailed the efforts of actors who brought Shakespeare and other serious tragedies. For most people if you stopped them in the street and shook them and asked them to name a serious late 19th Century playwright, quick! Well, they might just might come up with the name of Henrik Ibsen. But the works of Henrik Ibsen were slow to appear on Philadelphia stages, and of course this was true in much of America, too. The reputation of the Norwegian dramatist's works as being 'dangerous' or even 'immoral' lasted a long time.

The first presentation in Philadelphia of his play A Doll's House (under the title "A Doll's Home") was at the Broad Street Theatre by the touring company of actor-manager Richard Mansfield, who made regular trips to Philadelphia, but who only dared to present Doll’s House on a Wednesday matinee on November 6, 1889 - ten years after it was first written. 

A Philadelphia newspaper reviewer clearly hated the play, saying it was written by a “cynical genius, who never condescends to the exhibition of worthy human feeling except when he shows the love of a mother for her children, and then he satirizes that love by making her willing to desert them because of a quarrel with her husband in which she is wholly to blame." There is no record of the play being presented again in Philadelphia until a brief production at the Walnut Street Theatre in 1895. And then not again until well into the 20th century.

The even more controversial play of Ibsen’s, known in English as Ghosts, was generally regarded as 'disgusting' or 'revolting' after it was published in 1881, because of its mentions of venereal disease and incest. It was not available in printed form in Philadelphia until 1913.

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]

But let’s wander away from such elevated theatrical fare, as indeed most Philadelphia audiences did back in January of 1884. Because in that month, the national tour of Ida Siddons' Female Mastodons & Burlesque Company arrived in town, and brought their show to the New Central Theatre, just up the block from the Walnut.

Ida Siddons was a variety artist and burlesque impresario who was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1857. She first appeared on stage as a singer and dancer in 1879. Besides being the owner of a lovely figure which often got her featured in such early ‘gentlemen’s magazines’ as The Police Gazette, she had a head for business as well. As national vaudeville and burlesque circuits became organized across America during the 1880s, she was soon touring with her own company. This was quite an accomplishment, since there weren't many companies run by female managers in those days. Ida Siddons was eventually married to a man named Paul Hamlin, but it's unclear how much he was involved in the business at all. 

"Burlesque" did not have quite the connotations in the 19th Century that it would later acquire in the 20th. Though it definitely featured lots of young ladies showing legs and a bit of skin, it did not yet use strip tease. Instead, companies of women would skillfully parody or imitate famous operas, musicals and other plays. Nonetheless, exhibiting coy sexuality onstage was one of the genre’s chief allures, and the 'girl in the swing' trope that Ida Siddons was often to employ was ever popular.

One of the genres that burlesque artists might parody was also minstrel shows. And as we’ve heard in previous episodes, minstrel shows, which had been a principal form of popular entertainment in America since the 1840s, were evolving. As African-American minstrel companies became increasingly popular and successful, premier-level white minstrel companies were actually dropping blackface, and instead they were relying on the huge number of performers filling up the stage and their huge production values to make an impact. These were termed 'mastodon' companies, because of their large size. 

The 'mastodon' shows were what was being parodied in a poster, now in the collection of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, a copy of which I will post on the blog for the episode of our website www.AITHpodcast.com - the link is in the show notes. In this poster (which needs a bit of unpacking) you can see Ida in the center, acting as the 'Interlocutor', who sets up the jokes. "Billy's Dream" is written across the lyre that decorates the front of her seat - presumably the name of this particular elaborate skit. A row of people sitting on chairs, typical of minstrel shows, are arranged in a semi-circle downstage on either side of her. Two women in male drag sit on either side of Siddons, and eight other women in formal gowns and gloves flank them. They carry fans instead of the musical instruments you might expect in the classic minstrel show. Presumably the theater's regular orchestra, unseen here, would provide the musical accompaniment for the songs.

But then there are two other white women in the poster in blackface playing the 'end men', Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. This seems to be some sort of tribute to 'old time' minstrelsy, as they are dressed in male attire of the 1850s, when, as we discussed in Episode 24, the minstrel show genre first became widely popular. In the poster they are shown tossing tambourines across the stage to each other.

Across the top of the image, thirteen women swing away, legs on display, and wearing corsets and elaborate hats (actually these thirteen are probably Ida and the very same women in the foreground, but now shown again, doing the 'swing routine'). In the far background, for whatever reason, more people are rowing in a fancy barge in what looks like a Venetian lagoon. Two featured performers are depicted in isolated lunettes at the top corners of the image.

Overall, quite a lot to unpack there, isn’t it? But that’s why we provide this public service.

Ida Siddons toured for many years with various iterations of her burlesque company. In June of 1893 she was back in Philadelphia, but now appearing at the more grungy Eighth Street Theatre north of Market, with the "Nibbe French Burlesque Company". Ida Siddons did her own solo "serpentine dance." Charles Boyle and his Dancing Quakers were on the bill. The show ended with a grand finale featuring the entire company, entitled 'His Nibs and Nobs,' which ads promised "will have elegant costumes and appropriate scenery." In fact, by this point, this section of Eighth Street just to the west of Franklin Square, about ten theaters of this particular type that offered burlesque and low melodrama would eventually stand, including the Lyceum, the Gayety, and Forepaugh’s. Melodrama, burlesque and minstrel shows, surrounded by a lot of flophouses, billiard halls, drug dens and prostitution, frankly. Though Ida Siddons may have aspired to a sort of elegance onstage, outside the doors of her venue, this entire area of Philadelphia, sometimes called The Tenderloin by this point, had an increasingly unsavory reputation. No wonder Louisa Lane Drew, who had always fought so hard to preserve the ‘respectability’ of the theater business, had become eventually resigned to giving up management of the old Arch Street Theatre quite nearby in the early 1890s. There just was no moving it away from its present surroundings.

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]
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As you can see, the period of the late nineteenth century is in many ways one of the most fun eras to talk about in Philadelphia Theater History, but is also one frustrating to explore. Because there was SO MUCH going on, and yet so little of it had any lasting value - that we value today, anyway. The amount of melodrama, deftly staged and lavishly produced is just staggering. Also staggering is a simply amazing number of large theaters  that get constructed in the city over a period of just a few short years. It’s hard even for me to keep track of them. Now I don’t want to just list every one of them to you, because that’s just exhausting to hear, frankly. Instead, I’ll do my best to give you a quick story about many of them.

June 1888: Ground was broken on South Street  for the tall romanesque frontage of the Standard Theater. The owner William Gallagher decided instead to run it as a variety theater that tried to attract a white crowd, although its location was then mostly an African-American neighborhood. Construction went quickly, and it was ready for its grand opening on September 8th - just three months later. Miss Minnie Maddern appeared in her popular touring production of the play Caprice.

Just one month after that The Kensington Theatre opened at the corner of Frankford and Norris Streets on the northeast side of town. A blocky 4 story brick structure, the Kensington fit right in with the neighborhood’s factories and warehouses.The original capacity of the Kensington was for about 1900 people, and the first show booked for its largely working class audiences was Hoodman Blind. Ticket prices ranged from 75 to just 15 cents.

In the Spring of 1889 Israel Fleischman, a sometime business associate of Nixon and Zimmerman, who we talked about earlier, opened the 1600-seat Park Theater at the corner of Broad and Fairmount in North Philadelphia. Like the Kensington, it was built entirely with electric lighting both in the house and onstage. For its opening show, an actress the newspapers described as “Buxom Miss Annie Pixley” played in a sprightly and somewhat naughty farce entitled 22, Second Floor. The next week the bill would be changed to two melodramas: Zara and The Deacon’s Daughter.

November 4th, 1889 the Boston vaudeville impresario Benjamin Franklin Keith opened up the Bijou, his first theater in Philadelphia, whose rapid construction had been hampered only by a steelworkers strike in Pittsburgh earlier in the year which had delayed delivery of its cross beams. The policy of the house would be a novelty in the city Philadelphia — Continuous Vaudeville. That is: from 12 noon to 10:30 pm there would always be a show going on - come in when you like, and stay as long as you want. “Every convenience for the comfort and enjoyment of our patrons has been provided,” said Keith. But despite all this luxury, seats could be purchased for 25 cents in the orchestra, 20 cents in the balcony and the gallery was only a dime.

August 23, 1890: The brand new People's Theatre opened at the corner of Kensington Avenue and Cumberland Street. It could hold 2300 people in its large auditorium, and was designed to support the melodramatic spectacular shows of the day. Another large brick box of a building, nonetheless its spreading fanlike marquee that beckoned theatergoers indoors.

March 30, 1891: the new Girard Avenue Theatre opened to the public, nestled amidst the Northern Liberties neighborhood that was already home to many German-American families, and was now also quickly filling with newly-arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The elegant new theater was designed by the most prominent theater architect in the country, John Bailey McElfatrick. The front lobby and facade, topped by an ornate cornice over a series of four rounded windows, was on Girard Avenue and Marshall Streets, to the west of Seventh.

When the first patrons arrived at the New Girard Avenue Theatre they entered through an ornate tin and cast iron facade on the street front . . . and then walked through three narrow Rococo lobbies that led to a spacious 80 by 132 foot, 900-seat auditorium with its two horseshoe balconies decorated with plaster forms and a 70-foot high frescoed ceiling which was painted blue, silver, and white. The theater had all the latest  equipment. Dazzling electric lights lit the interior instead of the old dangerous gas lights that had often proved such a hazard to other theater structures.

To inaugurate the new theater, the manager had hired one of the most famous names in American show business - the great actor James O'Neill, who would of course perform his signature role in Alexandre Dumas' drama The Count of Monte Cristo on the theater’s opening night. "As an earnest of [the management's] policy the engagement of the celebrated actor . . . will prove highly satisfactory," wrote the Inquirer in a preview article. "He is not only gifted in his profession, but deservedly popular in Philadelphia, where he has achieved triumph after triumph for a series of years."

In fact James O'Neill had been performing the role of the Count of Monte Cristo for quite a while now. It was his bread-and-butter role, and as much as he wanted to he couldn't escape it - the money was too good. Although he was offering another play, Robert Landry, later in the week, everybody came to see him do The Count. O’Neill’s wife, the long-suffering Mary Ellen (or Ella) O'Neill knew the routine all too well. She was ensconced in a nearby hotel - probably the Eagle Hotel at Sixth and Girard - with their two year-old son Eugene. The couple’s eldest son Jamie was off at boarding school, and their second son Edmund, well he had been dead for several years now - a fact which Ella tried to forget, along with what she regarded as her sordid and vagabond domestic life. And once her famous husband was off at the theater to do the Count of Monte Cristo one more time (and the future playwright was asleep in his little hotel trundle bed), Ella likely injected herself with the opium that she was addicted to, and she drifted away.

[TRANSITION MUSIC] 

In American show business, just like real estate business, the three most important words were “Location, location, and location”. The Empire Theatre, built on the southeast corner of Broad and Locust directly across from the Academy of Music, was built in 1891. Looking like a fantasy of a Spanish medieval castle with thick walls, huge pointed turrets at each corner and a gallery of collonaded windows across the top in a style that was described as “modified Moorish”. Amazingly, this sturdy-looking structure, which looked like it could withstand a siege, lasted only eight years, after which its interior was ripped out and its foundations reused to become the base of the huge new Walton Hotel right on top of it. 

But in 1891, that hadn’t happened yet - so much was happening right now! There was no time to look forward, so much was happening right then! In the newspaper the Philadelphia Record, in January 1891, a story appeared that was entitled “Over 2 Million Dollars for Fun: Philadelphia is a great theater going city.” The Record’s reporter wrote. “Among actors Philadelphia is spoken of as a theatre city second to none in the country. It excels both in the number and excellence of its theatre buildings and in the large patronage enjoyed by all of them.  . . .Nearly all of the old theaters have been remodeled within the last year and a half, and some magnificent new ones have been added. " In fact, the article boasted, the number of theaters in Philadelphia neared that of New York, and far exceeded those of Boston -  and the amount of theatrical activity inside them? Every single one of the city's twenty major commercial houses (if we include the Academy of Music) were booked solid that year. And all of the stages were packed with performers - casts of fifty were common at the time. Even a hundred people might pack the stage at the Academy, or even the smaller Walnut or Broad Street Theatres. 

And over the course of a forty-week theatrical season, calculated the reporter, the overall attendance at plays in the city was 5 million people. This meant that the average Philadelphian attended the theater at least five nights a year.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]
__________

December 2, 1894: The Mask and Wig Club, the all-male student comedy theatrical club at the University of Pennsylvania, opened its new clubhouse on 310 S. Quince Street to the East of Broad.

Originally built as an African-American Lutheran Church in 1834, the building had served as a coach house and then a stable for many years, and then later as a dissecting room for medical students.

The club, founded six years before by a small group of undergraduates, had quickly boomed in popularity. The Mask and Wig’s annual shows at the Chestnut Street Opera House were heavily attended by Philadelphia society and much publicized in Philadelphia newspapers. In just a few years the Mask and Wigs were able to purchase the Center City property, far from the university's main campus in West Philadelphia. The eminent Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre was hired to convert the small building into a meeting place, bar, and rehearsal space. He redid the exterior in his typical 'shingle' style - very fashionable. Speaking of ‘fashionable’, Eyre employed the young artist Maxfield Parrish to decorate the interior. Especially famous was the mural of Old King Cole in the Grill Room, here the personal drinking mugs of members hanging on the wall surrounding it. The painting attracted the eye of the editor of Harper's Magazine, who hired Parrish to start doing the magazine covers for which he would become famous. By the spring of 1895, its members were ready to produce their annual Spring show - and this year it would be Kenilworth, a spoof on the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Well, at last we’ve arrived at what I am using as the end point of this episode detailing this entire amazing period Philadelphia theater - of which I’ve only described one-thousandth of what actually went on - March 21, 1897: As the Easter Season approached and spring began that year, the theaters of Philadelphia were literally bursting with activity. 

The Philadelphia Sunday newspapers listed the coming week's fare next to the name of every theater. The Gay College Girls was at the Arch Street Theatre - an offering matched, evidently, by At Gay Coney Island at Gilmore's Auditorium on Walnut. Forepaugh's Theatre was offering the old melodrama standby The Wages of Sin, while at the Girard one could find The Comforts of Home. The People's Theater in Kensington was hosting Old Lavender by Edward Harrigan, while the Walnut Street Theatre held A Bachelor's Romance starring Sol Smith Russell - who was doing 'the best work of his career', said one reviewer. The burlesque theaters in the Tenderloin district, like the Trocadero and the Lyceum were replete with buxom beauties, and the vaudeville houses - The Bijou on Arch, The Dime Museum, the Gayety - offered 'continuous performances' of short acts of singers, acrobats, comedians, dancers - anything you might imagine. And at the Eleventh Street Opera House, as it had for the past several decades, Dumont’s - now Philadelphia’s remaining resident minstrel troupe - was offering its weekly fare of satirical and topical review of current events and fashions, served over a steaming bed of racial caricature.

We might perhaps take special note of one small offering in the bill at Kieth’s Bijou in the Tenderloin that week, which included such stars as Bert Williams and George Walker performing “The Real Cake Walk”, Harry Atkinson known as 'the Australian Orpheus', and Eugene and O'Rourke doing "After The Ball",  there was an additional technological curiosity, thrown in between live acts: the called it The Biograph - or, as we might say now, the movies.

The Bijou was one of the first theaters in America, even in the world, to offer its audiences the new invention, Lumiere’s "Moving Pictures" - starting on Christmas Day, 1895. (Possibly even a few days before they began being exhibited in Paris.) Again for the holidays in 1896 the Bijou started showing ten minutes of short films called "New Inauguration Views", and it was such a popular daily feature by the Easter Season of 1897. In fact, Forepaugh's Theatre, nearby, was entering into the competition with it for the new technology. Between acts of the perennially popular melodrama The Wages of Sin, it advertised that it was showing French films of the ORIGINAL Lumiere's Cinematographe.  

Still, on the whole movies were just a sidelight at the time. In March of 1897, nothing in American show business was as popular, or as well attended, as the star Lillian Russell, who was appearing in An American Beauty at the Chestnut Street Opera House.

"Lillian Russell, fairer and more captivating than ever, was arrayed in many changes of marvelous costumes and literally ablaze with almost priceless jewels in her new opera," gushed the Philadelphia Times.

In the spring of 1897, it was the Best of Times for live theatrical entertainment, not just in Philadelphia, but everywhere in America. Everyone in the audience and everyone on the stage thought this was normal, it would just go on and on and on . . . forever.  Why not? As far as everyone knew, it could always be just like this.

As for what actually happens next? Well, we are going to leave telling that story for now, on the cusp of the Twentieth Century. We’ll take a few months off here from researching and writing episodes. This is the end of Season One. Now don’t take us off your podcast feeds, though, we’ll still be putting out exciting episodes. Over the intervening few months, we’ll be sharing interviews with theater historians and many actual theater artists and participants in the story of Philadelphia theater. It’s all part of our long-term project to document what’s been going on here, to stress how much life and vibrancy theater and the performing arts have given to the city of Philadelphia, and how much of that story still needs to be told and appreciated by theater historians and by lovers of the performing arts around the world, so that we will be sure to treasure it, to support it, and to make sure it keeps happening, into the future. Because, you know, much has changed since 1897, good lord much has changed since 1997! And before you know it, it will be 2097. Now, neither you and I are gonna know what that gonna be like, but hopefully in some theater somewhere, Someone will be listening to the orchestra play and feel like that moment, right then, that is the Best of Times.

I’m Peter Schmitz. The sound engineering for the show has been done by Christopher Mark Colucci. I want especially to thank Mr. Charles Kaufmann and the singers and orchestra of the Longfellow Chorus of Portland Maine, as well as the Charlotte Cushman Foundation of Philadelphia for their generous help, cooperation and support. And thank you - all of you wonderful listeners - for coming along on this - on this, the first season, but surely not the last, of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[CLOSING THEME]

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