48. Hammerstein's Opera House, Part Three

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Hello I’m Peter Schmitz, and I’m supported, as always, by the music and the sound design of Christopher Mark Colucci. Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia.

[ MUSIC UNDER]

Today we complete our trilogy of episodes about Oscar Hammerstein and his opera house on N. Broad Street. When we left him last, he had just completed his first full season of presenting opera in Philadelphia in the 4000-seat palace of art that he and his son Arthur Hammerstein had managed to construct in just seven months. That first season, as he brought great artists and beautifully produced grand opera to Philadelphia - in conjunction with his other main endeavor the Manhattan Opera in New York - the city was filled with controversy, struggle and triumph. In fact, I think we can say it was largely due to Hammerstein that grand opera really transfixed a good portion of the American cultural scene back in those days. His well-publicized war with his great foe, the Metropolitan Opera, that fine old bastion of the New York upper classes and their stodgy old opera productions versus Hammerstein’s artistically dynamic and democratically welcoming opera had reached its peak, earning him front page stories across the nation. It was quite a heady time for him. In New York, his Victoria Theatre - the vaudeville house that really created the Times Square theater district was still doing well, and he was still putting on great operas - working almost exclusively on a repertoire of classic Italian works and newer cutting edge French-language operas. 

But in the Spring of 1909 - where we left off, the end of our last episode - there were clear signs that things weren’t going as well as he might have hoped. As we detailed, Hammerstein was running a loss at the Philadelphia opera house, and had been forced to get a mortgage of $400,000 against it from the wealthy financier Edward Stotesbury. In fact Stotesbury had donated outright a further $67,000 to cover Hammerstein’s deficit in Philadelphia for the rest of the season.

Now Edward Stotesbury, as we said, was an extremely successful banker. By 1909 Stotesbury was raking it in, and had become a huge figure both in the Philadelphia business world and in its cultural scene, taking his place among the grandees of the city. This put him frequently in both the audiences of the Met at the Academy of Music on Tuesday evenings and the Philadelphia Opera on North Broad on Thursdays and Saturdays. 

[MUSIC OUT]

[But you know what else? All this time, I’ve been holding back one other major character for this whole narrative. He’s just been sitting there, patiently, in the wings, waiting for his entrance. And though, unlike Stotesbury, this guy was not a Philadelphian, his fortune and his worldwide influence was much much larger. And this man was the real reason that Oscar Hammerstein’s effort to take down the Metropolitan Opera was never going to work, and why the Met was always going to eventually win the Opera Wars. Though everyone agreed it had sure been fun, the outcome was never really in doubt. . in fact, as he makes his long-delayed appearance, you can imagine this character taunting the helpless Hammerstein, now ready to make his final deadly move. His name was . . .  Otto Kahn

[Shatner: KAAAAAAAHNNN!!! " Segue to DRAMA IS CONFLICT” OPENING THEME]

Well forgive me for that, but I couldn’t resist that joke. In fact at first I was very tempted to call this episode “The Wrath of Kahn”, (KAHN not KHAN) but then I decided that it just didn’t fit the historical facts, darn it. “The Math of Kahn” would be more apt - really this part of the story is about numbers, and deal-making. So please, get rid of that image I just placed in your mind of vengeful Ricardo Montalban from the movie Star Trek II, rocking his white 1980s wig, and an anguished William Shatner as Captain Kirk bellowing in protest. Just let it go.

[MUSIC UNDER ]

Because the real guy, the financier Otto Kahn, a leading partner in the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co, the canny reorganizer of American railroads, the brains behind some of the biggest investment deals of his era, all over the world - he was in fact a very nice man, mild-mannered and affable and kind and generous and cultured. He looked nothing like a vengeful interstellar space villain - if anything, Otto Kahn looked like the classic little millionaire guy from the Monopoly game. He typically wore a morning coat, striped pants and sported a pointy mustache on his upper lip - sometimes a tall top hat on his head. Otto Kahn, like Hammerstein, born in Germany to a Jewish family, and as a youth he too had wanted to be musician, but instead he had gone into the banking business, where he had prospered - and I mean, really prospered.

In the early 20th Century, having moved to America, Otto Kahn, a great supporter of music and opera during his non-business hours, had slowly and carefully picked up the majority of the shares in the Metropolitan Opera Company, and eventually he owned 85% of it. Just so you know, the guy who owned the other 15% was William K. Vanderbilt, so that’s the kind of company Kahn was keeping, at least, downtown in the financial district. Uptown, however, he could not even get his application for a private box in the audience of the Met approved by its Box Committee (which was a separate entity), even though Kahn was in fact, the one who had essentially produced the show. The deep anti-Semitism of the old New York upper class families had not yet relaxed or relented. But Otto Kahn just would quietly take a seat in the director's box to see Richard Wagner being performed.  He was not the sort to make a public protest even against this clear and ugly discrimination. Although sometimes, during the more boring bits, he would leave and grab a bunch of newspaper guys from the Met’s press box and take them a couple of blocks away to catch a vaudeville act for a while. At least till Wotan was done with his lengthy ruminations.

[08:20] In fact, Otto Kahn had also slipped away to attend Hammerstein’s intriguing productions at the Manhattan Opera House, too. He admired Hammerstein’s whole approach. They were kindred spirits - not just his disdain for New York’s high society, and the way Oscar watched his shows from his perch on a kitchen chair in the wings - but Kahn liked Hammerstein’s repertory, his selection of singers, his democratic approach to the whole art form. And he rather envied the way Hammerstein was able to throw up one grand new theater building after another. Kahn’s own efforts to fund something called The New Theater up on New York City’s Central Park West went badly awry, resulting in a complete fiasco of a building with horrible acoustics.

For a while, in fact, Otto Kahn even toyed with the idea of getting Oscar Hammerstein to take over the Metropolitan Opera. But he quickly realized that would have never worked - Oscar, as we have seen, did not play well with others. He didn’t even socialize much. Amazingly, while in New York this millionaire opera impresario lived in just two dingy little rooms above the marquee of his Victoria Theatre, where there was just enough room for a bed, a piano, piles of scores from operas strewn everywhere, and his little machines for crafting his own cigars. Outside of those rooms, of course, Oscar really lived a fine life, in public. He loved talking to newspaper men whenever he could and hobnobbing with singers and conductors - and maybe having a few romances with curvaceous ladies who caught his fancy. If he liked you, he called you Mike, and he liked a lot of people so he called a lot of people Mike. But if he didn’t like you, Oscar Hammerstein told you to go to hell, and he meant it. But at night he always took the streetcar back to the Victoria Theatre, back to his two little rooms, to tinker with cigar machines, and play the piano, maybe he slept a little - not enough. And then in the morning he’d be back to working on operas.

And of course he also really existed just to beat the Met, even though by late 1909 he knew the battle was breaking him financially. This venture into Philadelphia that had once looked so promising was turning into Oscar Hammerstein’s Waterloo. He started demanding “guarantees” of $7500 a week from his Philadelphia audience, literally demanding that he be directly subsidized by the wealthy folk of the Quaker City, in return for bringing them the great gifts of operatic glory four times a week. He insisted that the Met was secretly getting a subsidy from the stockholders of the Academy of Music, and he wanted the same deal, he said.

So, looking at this whole situation, Otto Kahn figured that there was one obvious way to win the Opera War. He was gonna buy Hammerstein out, and get him to leave the business entirely, just to name his price and step aside. Of course, if he had wanted to, the banker could have just waited until Oscar ran out of money and then step in to pick up the pieces, but Kahn didn’t really want to destroy Hammerstein. He respected him. He decided instead to gently move him to the sidelines in a gracious retirement. And of course in return he wanted control of his opera houses.

[MUSIC OUT]

Coincidentally, that whole scenario was exactly what Oscar Hammerstein’s son Arthur wanted too! For the past five years, Arthur Hammerstein had been a loyal right hand man, putting up with his dad’s obsessive mania for staging operas - and building new opera houses. Arthur had supervised their construction, fought with the building trade unions, he had staved off creditors, and made nice with all the wealthy box holders that his father pushed away. Arthur had sat and listened to more operas than he really ever cared to in his life. And he watched in frustration as all the profits that the family was making in their other businesses went inexorably down the opera money pit. But now Arthur saw his chance to extricate himself and his whole family from the certain doom that was looming on the horizon, now that it was clear that the Philadelphia Opera House was not, in fact, going to be the first of a string of opera houses stretching across the nation. Quietly, Arthur Hammerstein opened a back channel of communication with Otto Kahn.

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]

Meanwhile, let’s get this story out of New York and down to Philadelphia again. Because even while all these backstage maneuverings were taking place, the two great opera companies were still doing all they could to defeat each other from their positions on the opposite ends of Broad Street.

On Tuesday November 9th, 1909 the long-awaited Philadelphia next opera season began - and amazingly, BOTH the Metropolitan at the Academy and Hammerstein at the Philadelphia Opera House were staging the same opera - Verdi’s huge Egyptian extravaganza Aida! I’m telling you in Philly that night there must have been some demand for elephants! And of course everyone was agog to know which house all the great opera-going families would choose to attend- especially those who held private boxes - as some did - in both theaters.

The Met had thrown an incredible amount of talent into the Academy of Music for the occasion. Not only was Arturo Toscanini himself leading the orchestra that night, but onstage was Enrico Caruso as Radames and the great German dramatic soprano Johanna Gadski was Amneris. “It was perhaps the finest performance of Aida ever given in that historic house,” gushed a Philadelphia critic, “and that is saying a good deal.” Meanwhile the Philly newspapers all vied to describe all the ropes of diamonds and pearls and the tiaras and the gowns that were all on view in all the boxes and all the names of the grand families that were wearing them.

Up at Hammerstein’s Aida, for its part, there was not quite as much star power on the stage, as three of the principal singers were making their debuts in the roles, and in fact one of them, Henry Scott as Ramfis, was a relatively unknown Philadelphian.  True Madame d’Alvarez the Peruvian soprano who was singing Amneris was well known and very competent, but she was also perhaps a bit too infamous as the object of Oscar Hammerstein’s romantic attentions during that period. However precisely because Oscar was trying to woo this diva, even more had been spent on making her surroundings glorious. The orchestra had been increased in size for the occasion and the scenic effects one reporter wrote were gorgeous, “almost barbaric in its splendor, while every possible accessory had been added to make the pageantry effective.”
I am sorry to report that there was not quite the same mad rush up Broad Street that year halfway through the evening as there had been before. But those patrons who left Aida at the Academy to make it to the other one uptown - at least when they shifted locations this time, there was no interruption in the narrative. They got to see the last acts of the very same opera they had just left! [16:38]

Over the next few months, the entire 1909-1910 Philadelphia opera season went on much the same way  - just a glorious succession of one masterpiece after another - the Met was really throwing heavy artillery into the fray - Leo Slezak as Otello, Mary Farrar as Cio-Cio San - and they covered the field with huge barrages of Richard Wagner - Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal! And by this time the Met had upped its number of weekly performances to two, giving shows on Tuesday and Thursday nights, as well.

Meanwhile Hammerstein countered with modern works like Strauss’ Elektra, and also with his local favorites like Luisa Tetrazzini in La Traviata and she was usually partnered by the new Irish tenor John McCormack. There were also lots of French operas like Massenet’s Herodiade and Lakme by Delibes. Mary Garden was back and she made frequent appearances in the shows from her repertoire - though not as Salome, not this time.

And remember that Hammerstein was presenting twice as many productions up at his opera house. If the Met would stage Tosca, on Tuesday, well then he would too, and throw in Carmen as well on Saturday. If the Met was giving lengthy productions of heavy Wagnerian music, he would counter - trying to attract Philadelphia audiences with delightful gems like the Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach or The Daughter of the Regiment. Of course, all this time, there was the secret war between him and Otto Kahn, too - well pretty secret - all throughout the season, you could read in the newspapers the rumblings of the behind the scenes negotiations, as sometimes Hammerstein would hold a press conference and proclaim he could outlast anyone and would take over the Met’s nights at the Academy too! And then at other times demanded even great guarantees and subsidies for the shows he was already doing, or threatened to stop doing opera completely and bring in the vaudeville acts. 

But it was mostly just a lot of bluster and he knew it - and so did Otto Kahn, who had excellent financial information on just about everything that was going on back then. Kahn was completely aware that Hammerstein was losing tens of thousands of dollars every week, and that he could not keep this war up. Edward Stotesbury, who was on very good terms with Otto Khan by now, it turned out, was increasingly clearing his throat in a significant manner in Hammerstein’s direction. The end was near, by that point. 

In March 1910, Arthur Hammerstein persuaded his father to depart for Europe for a while, and he borrowed against his own life insurance to pay for dad to be sent off to live in Paris. As Oscar left, he grudgingly gave Arthur free rein to make whatever deal he could get, and then wire him the money. 

The final performances of Hammerstein’s Philadelphia Opera company was on Saturday the 25th of March, 1910. In the afternoon there was a matinee of Verdi’s Rigoletto - and then in the evening a grand gala concert of selections from the entire season, [20:08 - FADE OFFENBACH MUSIC OUT CROSSFADE SFX: applause, continuing under following text] with special solos and duets by his cavalcade of star performers. 

It was the end of an era, as they say, and everyone sort of knew it. [20:22 - SFX OUT] But nobody was quite prepared for just how sweeping the changes that were coming would be. In April 1910 it was announced that the Metropolitan Opera Company was paying 1.25 million dollars - in return, Oscar Hammerstein agreed to stop producing grand opera entirely in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia for the next ten years. He could keep his Broadway houses, and would maintain control of the Manhattan Opera theater, but it could only host light operas and operettas, so as not to compete any more with the Met. The war was over, and he had lost. 

The transaction included $400,000 that was to go to Edward Stotesbury, to pay off the mortgage, and he now gained  title to the Philadelphia Opera House. In fact, he and Otto Kahn went into the producing business together, organizing a new Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company, which took over all the contracts of Hammerstein’s big stars and took ownership of all his sets, costumes, and props. 

And it turned out that in fact the Metropolitan Opera company would no longer present its Philadelphia shows as it had done for 25 years, at the Academy of Music, but instead it would now move into the larger and more acoustically welcoming theater that Hammerstein had built on North Broad Street. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the building got forever saddled with the oddly New York-sounding name “The Met”, which is what everyone calls it, to this day.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

So, as we usually ask at this juncture of our longer narratives, what remains? How did it all turn out? Well, that’s a bit of a story, so strap in again, here we go. The very next season, 1910-1911, The Metropolitan Opera and this new Chicago-Philadelphia opera company, continued to stage their Philadelphia seasons there, on alternate days, and they continued doing that, until 1918. But then that came to an end. Evidently the nostalgic pull of the comfortable old Academy of Music was just too strong. Their last performance on North Broad Street was Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in May 1918, and then the Met returned to doing Tuesday evening shows on South Broad Street, just like before. Now Edward Stotesbury was by this point a bit distracted. He had gotten married, late in life, and now was more concerned with building and maintaining his simply enormous new mansion Whitemarsh Hall in the suburbs and he wasn't much concerned with maintaining Hammerstein’s palace in the middle of town. He sold the building at a public auction in 1920, and it was bought up by Frederick Nixon-Nirdlinger, the son of our old friend from the Theatrical Syndicate. Everyone still called it The Metropolitan Opera, however, and ballet companies, and smaller opera troupes and concert promoters continued to use it. For a while the tiny Philadelphia stock company of local favorite actress named Mae Desmond rattled around in it, though she never could fill that 2000 seat balcony up there.

As for Oscar Hammerstein - well he immediately took the money that Otto Kahn paid him, and used the entire amount to build and fund an enormous new opera house - in London, England, this time.  And although that project went all right for a little while, eventually Hammerstein met with the same old problems, he couldn’t compete with the Covent Garden Opera in London, and he had to sell out to pay his debts and go back to a frustrated retirement in America. But this time he had lost everything. His son Arthur had been pretty furious, and refused to speak to him again for years. But Oscar couldn’t help being who he was. He just couldn’t live without spending every cent he had on opera. That’s what money was for, after all, to him.  Once, the story goes, a London journalist asked him; “Well Mr Hammerstein, how's the opera business?” “Opera’s no business, Mike,” replied Hammerstein. “It’s a disease.” By August of 1919, Hammerstein lay dying in New York hospital of kidney failure. His grandson Oscar Hammerstein II sat for a few minutes by his bedside. The future writer and lyricist was 24 at that point, but his own father, Oscar’s son Willie, had already died and Oscar II and his grandfather had never been close. Not at all. In fact, he wrote later, those few minutes he spent with his unconscious namesake in that hospital room were the longest time they had ever been in the same room together, ever.

[MUSIC, UNDER]

Back in Philadelphia, after The Met left The Met, the 1920s were hard years for N. Broad Street’s businesses and cultural institutions, generally, for most of it the entire thoroughfare was being torn up -  the Broad Street Subway line was being dug. All that disruption tended to make every location less desirable, and often a little more difficult to access. And really, this was the period when N. Broad began its long downturn, economically speaking, at least, as white the upper and middle classes started to abandon the area for the suburbs, and much less affluent, and mostly working class Black families began to move in. The other big theaters along N. Broad - began to close up shop, become other things, become movie houses. Just get torn down. Auto companies began to build a lot of garages and dealerships along the street. Not a thrilling atmosphere, overall,  for great art.

Nevertheless the glorious opera house at the corner of Poplar St. still stood, and it continued to attract attention and spark wild dreams in many people in the world of American entertainment. In the fall of 1926 New York theater producer Morris Gest brought to Philadelphia Max Reinhardt’s staging of the wordless religious spectacle called The Miracle, for five entire weeks. Now 1926 was the same year, of course, that the city of Philadelphia was hosting the Sesquicentennial World’s Fair -  in South Philadelphia, and the whole city was evidently in the mood for trying out grandiose projects - Philadelphia was increasingly desperate, in fact, to demonstrate it was NOT, as the rest of the country all joked that it was, a big sleepy and politically corrupt backwater. It needed events like “the Sesqui” and The Miracle to prove them all wrong, I guess. The show employed a cast of 600 people in all, including an actual British peeress, Lady Diana Manners, who played the role of the Madonna. Unlike the rest of the huge debacle that was the Sesqui, by some miracle The Miracle was an enormous hit, and for the first time in years people packed the former opera house to the rafters.

Philadelphia movie theater owner Jules Mastbaum, who ran the Stanley Theatre down on East Market St, was so enthused by this commercial success of The Miracle at the former opera house that he bought the entire place in 1928. Mastbaum was the one who formally renamed it “The Met” and he installed a movie projection booth in the middle of the Grand Tier of its boxes. He also tore out a lot of other boxes to install 39 ranks of pipes for an enormous 4-rank Moeller theater organ, with a keyboard console that was placed in the center of the orchestra pit. Mastbaum’s idea was that the theater could now be the biggest and most spectacular movie house in the city. But the audiences never showed up and this idea also crashed - even more quickly than Hammerstein’s had, and within five months Mastbaum had lost $170,000 dollars, and he too admitted defeat and left.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, the Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski took a special interest in the former opera house, whose acoustics were always widely acknowledged as far superior to the ‘Fabulous Philadelphians’ longtime home at the Academy of Music. Stokowski, yet another in our string of wildly ambitious visionaries, brought several amazing projects to The Met during the early years of the Great Depression.

First there was a fully staged version of the Stravinski ballet The Rites of Spring, and Alban Berg’s modernist opera Wozzek. Stokowski brought another Stravinski work, a setting of the Greek tragedy Oedipus, to the Met in 1931 with the entire choir of Princeton University as the chorus, and huge 9-foot tall puppets to embody the main characters. In 1932, Stokowski conducted the world premiere of a ballet Caballos de vapor featuring two of Mexico's greatest artists, with music by composer Carlos Chávez and costumes and sets by the painter Diego Rivera. The ballet even attracted New York audiences down to the Philly Met again, for the first time in years. Arriving on a special train were celebrities including Rivera and his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo, and composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. However, the evening did not turn out to be an artistic success, reviews were tepid, and soon after Leopold Stokowski seemed to lose his enthusiasm for performing in North Philadelphia.

[MUSIC OUT]

For the rest of the 30s the venue limped by with a few scattered concerts and shows, but was often again empty. By late 1939, it changed owners again, and sports promoters built a wooden floor out over the orchestra seats. Where Carmen had once sung of l’amour, Basketball games, boxing matches and wrestling shows were often on the bill.

The story just gets weirder and weirder from this point on. All I can say is, at least the building survived.

In the 1950s, the theater was purchased by the white Evangelical pastor, a man named Thea Jones, who converted it into a church from which he would preach to packed houses of his largely Black congregation, and he would broadcast these Sunday services over the radio and the television for the next four decades. It was what we would now call a megachurch. Billing itself “The Church That Prays for The Sick”, the blind, the deaf, and the lame were regularly made whole again after receiving prayer and being anointed with holy oil. "It's Not Me, But The Lord's The One Who Heals" was Reverend Jones’ catchphrase. I can just imagine the satisfaction on all the faces of the ministers who had once condemned Oscar Hammerstein’s production of Salome way back in 1909 - all of them now up in Heaven, no doubt. Oh the mills of God grind slowly, they must have said to each other, but they grind exceedingly small, do they not? Hallelujah.

I should be clear that the congregation of that church loved the building. In 1972, they even got it placed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, Rev. Jones never seemed to be able to spare enough money from his ministry to maintain the needs of the physical structure. And its needs by this point were considerable - almost overwhelming. The evidence of the years and the hard use it had undergone were evident. The glorious plaster ceilings that Arthur Hammerstein had installed were crumbling, as water damage from roof leaks kept appearing all over them. Eventually even Rev. Jones, before his death in 1992, moved his congregation out, and the City of Philadelphia declared the structure uninhabitable. The place was so alarming-looking that scenes for the post-apocalyptic 1997 movie Twelve Monkeys (maybe you’ve seen it) were filmed there. It was still a church. Members of the longtime congregation kept coming back to the space - literally sneaking past warning signs and ducking through holes in the surrounding chain link fence to gain access every Sunday, and continued to worship, most newspapers and city officials sadly predicted that the old theater’s days were numbered.

[GOSPEL MUSIC, UNDER]

But you know, it seemed that by this point the Lord was maybe done punishing the legacy of Oscar Hammerstein in Philadelphia. The Pentecostal congregation, now calling itself Holy Ghost Headquarters and Revival Center moved in. The people of the surrounding neighborhood cared about this building. They wanted to save it - it had played a big part in the central spiritual and social aspects of their lives, for so many years. They were determined not to let this iconic structure, this neighborhood jewel, be torn down. They raised funds to stabilize the building, to make it once again an inspiring community space and a center of worship, even though for many years a huge blue tarp had to be stretched over that crumbling ceiling. 

By this point, of course, it had been a church for much longer than it had ever been a theater, but the wheel was about to turn again. In 2012, church leaders sold a 50% stake in the building to local developer Eric Blumenfeld for $1, a share in rental profits, and the right to continue worshiping there. Now this canny deal - one that even Otto Kahn might have appreciated - opened the way, eventually, for the over $56 million makeover of the old Philadelphia Metropolitan Opera House by another entity with Very Deep Pockets indeed - the Live Nation Corporation - into what it is to today, The Met, the gleaming live music venue with delightful and lively illuminated signs on the exterior. The congregation retains its headquarters there, however, and holds services every Sunday.

[CROSSFADE MUSIC] Since I’m often in that neighborhood, I stopped by to take a look at it the other day and snap some photos for the website, and I’m glad to report that it was looking quite well in the early evening light, its electronic advertising boards all lit up - The signs were touting a lot of upcoming acts, including some comedians, some bands, including by the way - Boyz II Men, who were coming there in a few days. Boyz II Men are a Philly band! They got their start when they met at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts on South Broad. And now, the Motown Philly sound, just like The Met, was back on Broad Street! The photos I took that day are in the blog post for this episode on our website, www.aithpodcast.com.  Go there if you want to check out all the images I’ve posted about a lot of the figures I’ve talked about in this episode, and how they document the long term evolution of the building - this passion project that Oscar Hammerstein wanted to bring to Philadelphia many years ago. It didn’t end when he left. Over 100 years later, other people have picked up the ball. The amazing theater/concert hall/church is still there. And the music - music like Oscar Hammerstein never imagined - still goes on. 

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” CLOSING THEME]

So, that’s our show for today. Remember to subscribe to us on whatever podcasting app you’re using to listen. That way you won’t miss the fun when we discuss Censorship in Philadelphia theater in our next episode. If you’re a new listener or a longtime one, write to us - tell us why you tuned in, what you’re enjoying about the show. We’d love to hear from you. Our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com. Or you can contact us via our website. There is also a Patreon account for those of you who want more information and images that are not available on the podcast feed, and who want to support our work. The link is in the show notes, and it will take you right there.  Thank you, all  of you, so much for listening, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END MUSIC]