The Boom

Transcript

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz. Our original theme music is composed by Christopher Mark Colucci. Join us as as we cover the years 1939 to 1945, The War Years, in the continuing story of our Season Three: The Tryout Town

[MUSIC - UNDER]

March 15, 1939: It was the season of Lent, so according to the fashion rules of the day, one did not have to 'dress up' for the theater in Philadelphia.

Two days previously, the post-Broadway touring show Knickerbocker Holiday - a musical about the merry old days of the 1647, back when New York was still Dutch, and called “New Amsterdam" - had opened at the Chestnut Street Opera House. "Not a few regular first-nighters arrived in street dress," society columnist Jane Wister wrote in the Inquirer.

"Mrs. W. Laurence Le Page, Agness Yarnall to you, looking the last word in chic, wore a good-looking black suit, with a tall chapeau of the same color, and some sort of an Ascot tie tucked in the neck. At one side of the house we caught sight of Eleanor Westcott, her rich brunette coloring displayed to advantage in a terra cotta street suit, to which she added a tiny toque, with wing trimming, and directly across the theater sat Frances Westcott, lovely in black lace, with Mrs. Upton Favorite, whose choice was a becoming garnet velvet, over which she donned a loose boxed mink coat."

There had been a number of socially prominent weddings in Philadelphia and along the Main Line recently, observed Mrs. Wister, but the social obligation to attend these Big Name nuptials did not apparently deter Philadelphia Society folk who loved to make an appearance at every show that came to town. "Arriving early, with the much-loved Mrs. George Dallas Dixon as their guest, the J. Howard Rebers took their places well down front, the hostess concealing a most becoming frock with a full-length black coat . . . Mrs. Dixon, too, had chosen the ever-popular all-black. . . Mrs. Alan H. Reed was occupying her customary seat a row or two back of the musicians, wearing a jacket effect of what appeared to be ostrich, in the loveliest shade of purplish-lavender."

As for the show itself, Mrs. Wister reported that the "always delightful" Walter Huston was playing the 17th century New Yorker Peter Stuyvesant with "a naughty twinkly in his eye and a fascinating smile . . in a way which leaves you wondering just how the 'peg leg' Governor of long ago managed so successfully to elude for so many years the holy bonds of matrimony."

Mrs. Wister, in her fashion reporting, naturally enough left out several other aspects of the evening that cast an interesting light on Knickerbocker Holiday - as the globe was inexorably falling into another World. The score of the show was by Kurt Weill, who had fled his native Germany for America when the Nazis came to power, and now was making his name as a Broadway composer - the song of from the show that you’ll remember is the wistful ode to late middle age romance, “September Song.” But there was an odd political undertone to the book of the show, by the prominent playwright Maxwell Anderson. Anderson was one of those people who saw President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal as a harbinger of Fascism - the whole show had a clear political subtext that warned of the danger of one-man rule, even if they were elected to office. This was a theme that was removed when the show was later made into a Hollywood movie in 1944, so don’t look for it here, but you can still find it in this rather dark recording of this number from the show, “How can you tell an American?”

Meanwhile, over at the Forrest Theatre, the D'Oyly Carte Company were back, and Gilbert & Sullivan's "Iolanthe" was on the bill for the evening. At the Walnut Street Theater, the WPA Federal Theatre Project was still presenting "Spirochete," the large cast historical examination of syphilis. I can find no word on what people wore to attend that show.

But at the very end of the decade, once again Philadelphia theaters - those that had avoided demolition, anyway - were humming with activity. The ironic thing about the fact that the world was all going mad was that it ended the economic Depression - even before the United States entrance into the conflict and military spending was ramping up, Philadelphia’s shipyards, rolling mills, military uniform makers and other military contractors were beginning to feel the effects, and once again Broadway producers were able find audiences with extra spending money to fill the seats as live entertainment was beginning to boom.

December 11, 1940: "Pal Joey" had its world premiere at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. Gene Kelly played in the title role, one which would propel him to stardom. George Abbott both directed and produced the show, and Jo Mielziner provided both the sets and the lighting.

The show was based on a series of short stories by the writer John O'Hara about an ambitious Chicago nightclub dancer who romances a series of women on his way to the top. The tales had originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, and were later adapted by O'Hara into a novel. The book of the show was also credited to O'Hara, but it had been extensively shaped by Abbott.

The songs were by the famous team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Their previous shows, including the recent Too Many Girls and The Boys From Syracuse, had always been a hit in Philadelphia. Their creations for Pal Joey included "I Could Write a Book," and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." The latter was memorably delivered by the Broadway veteran Vivienne Segal, a Philadelphia-born and raised actress, who had previously starred in Rodgers and Hart's 1938 show "I Married And Angel." Her portrayal of the wealthy middle-aged woman who falls for Joey (and then sadly watches him betray her for a younger woman), earned her enormous praise from every critic.

"Pal Joey" would prove to be the launching pad for many careers. Notable was the former child vaudevillian June Havoc - whose life story would later be featured along with that of her sister Rose in the musical "Gypsy." In the part of nightclub performer Gladys Bumps, Havoc would catch the attention of critics and producers, and go on to a great film career. (A dancer who had featured duets with Havoc was future Hollywood actor Van Johnson. Also in the chorus was Stanley Donen, soon to find success as a choreographer and film director.)

Opening night at the Forrest Theatre was jammed with the regular crowd of Philadelphia first-nighters. Society columnists happily noted the presence of eminent old names such as Wanamaker, Penrose, Dodge, and Clothier in the audience. The Quaker City, which in earlier days might have pretended to be shocked by the openly sexual nature of many of the show's situations and lyrics, were now happily receptive to such lyrics as "Horizontally speaking, he's at his very best!" delivered by Vivienne Segal's character, as she expressed her desire to desperately cling to Joey's trousers. The impressive amount of alluring females in the cast who interacted with Joey at some point or another during the show was always featured in the pre-show publicity - as was Gene Kelly's own considerable attractiveness.

Wrote critic Linton Martin in the Inquirer, effusively: "Pal Joey is, first and last, a rollicking, riotous, night club revel. A night club show made gay and gorgeous and glittering with the fastest, most fetching, dancing damsels, dressed in a spangle or two, that this town has seen this season."

Though it was later tagged with the label "problematic" because of its unsympathetic main character (one that perhaps only Gene Kelly could make charming), Pal Joey went straight from Philadelphia to open at the Barrymore Theatre (fittingly) on Broadway. It received mixed reviews from New York critics, but still ran for ten straight months.

[MUSIC OUT]

January 1, 1941: the Board of Managers of the Charlotte Cushman Club, now acting as part of the American Theatre Wing, headed by Mrs. Upton Favorite, Mrs. Lawrence Shubert Lawrence and Miss Eleanor Westcott, were holding a tea at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. All proceeds will go to the British War Relief Society.

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]

In the spring of 1941, Life With Father, the nostalgic comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse (based on the memoirs of Clarence Day about growing up in the family of a lovably cantankerous New York stockbroker in 1880s New York) opened at the Walnut Street Theatre.

This show, with its family of redheads, and its sentimental version of the past, was a hit all over America. After seeing its opening on Broadway in November of 1939, the former silent film stars, the sisters Dorothy and Lillian Gish, had realized the play was a perfect vehicle for them both. And they had approached the authors with a proposal that was soon accepted. Two touring companies of the play were organized. Lillian Gish took hers to Chicago, where it was so successful it played for 18 months straight. And then producer Oscar Serlin took Dorothy's company (in which she had cast her longtime lover Louis Calhern) to Boston, and then in March brought it down to Philadelphia.

But the Shuberts, with their stranglehold on every desirable venue in the city, wanted $52,000 weekly to be paid to their United Booking Office, on top of the usual house arrangements, to play it at the Forrest Theatre. So, Serlin neatly slipped by them by renting the dark old Walnut a few blocks to the east, paying a much more reasonable rate to its longtime Philadelphia owner, James Beury. Still, booking Walnut was a risky ploy, because no one was sure back then that Philadelphia audiences would still show up there to see any play at all.

Opening on March 3rd, the production of Life With Father was an immediate smash hit in the Quaker City. The critic Linton Martin - again, in the Inquirer - called it "authentic Americana." "And while it is enormously funny, its characters never become comic strip cartoons. They are three-dimensional, warm-blooded and utterly alive, though they are people in a period play, but a period play that is an indispensable delight, an amusement 'must' in this or any other season." By the end of its first week, the Walnut’s seats were already sold out, and the box office was selling fifty standing room tickets in the back for Philadelphians flocking to see this heart-warming comedy. During intermissions the audience could see an exhibit in the Walnut Street Theatre's foyer that documented the old house's long and important history in the city - the beginning of the type of decoration that persists to this very day. The Walnut Street Theatre’s lobby is still the great theater history museum in the city. As for Life With Father, well the show ran for three solid months in Philly, not closing until the last day of May. [ MUSIC OUT]

The Shuberts had certainly noticed all this activity, and in the fall of 1941, they took out a long-term lease on the Walnut from Beury, adding it to the stable of their Philly tryout houses. There was no more talk of tearing the place down, at any rate. And through their iron grip on the UBO - the United Booking Office - an institution they had taken over from the old Erlanger & Klaw Syndicate, and ran just as ruthlessly - they had a grip now on every play that came though Phill. Any show which came through Philly or Boston during its tryout period had to sign a UBO agreement. This allowed producers to get access to all the prime theaters that they controlled in New York.

Therefore, though the Shuberts rather looked down on - really despised - Philadelphia, they would fiercely hold on to their control over the Walnut and other theaters in Philadelphia under the management of family member Lawrence Shubert Lawrence. But you may remember that Lee Shubert, in particular, was openly scornful of his nephew’s business savvy and general competence. Lawrence Shubert Lawrence disliked New York and had decided to make Philly his long term home. His uncles - and his brother Milton Shubert had never quite understood this foible of Lawrence. By this point Lawrence was a rather sad figure, estranged from his wife and their son, (also called, confusingly, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence). Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Sr. had developed a long-term domestic relationship with another woman, an impressive rare book collection - and also an impressive drinking problem. Still LSL had his friends locally, most especially drama critic Linton Martin on the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer - who we hear from, all the time. It was through Martin’s columns that Lawrence Shubert Lawrence often seemed to be sending messages to his uncles and brother in New York - “Philadelphia was invaluable as a tryout town - and therefore you need me,” ran this message. Some big projects - mostly notably Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! - skipped trying out in Philadelphia entirely. And by this point, Philadelphia audiences (which mirrored the demographics of New York theatergoers closely) were trained to be discriminating and welcomed the chance to assess new material, said Martin. New York producers could save themselves a lot of trouble and money if they would just listen closely to the Philly audience and of course, the local critics - and of course that dear old neglected nephew, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence.

But other independent producers, of course, resented having to kowtow to the Shuberts. Sure they could generally be counted on to provide what’s known as “end money” - the last big chunk of change that almost every show needs to complete its financing. But they were notoriously stingy about developing new talent, new playwrights, and new projects. Left to himself, for example, J.J. Shubert (the other Shubert Brother) would just endlessly bring out yet another production of his favorite operetta, Blossom Time, or The Student Prince. All of this was well-known in the business, but of little interest to the theatergoing public. This was all Inside Baseball, or Inside Broadway, anyway.

The OTHER famous thing about dealing with the Shuberts was - well, all the ice. “Ice” was the term for the markup on tickets that you had to pay if you wanted a good seat in any Philadelphia theater to see a big Broadway tryout show. Typically when a show would be announced as coming through Philly, and booked into the Forrest or the Shubert, all the ads would tell you to book your seats in advance by mail-order, you had to write them a letter, and send a check or cash through the mail to the Shuberts offices in New York if you wanted a ticket in advance. Now most folks learned that even they did so, it was hard to get good seats - and you just had to take the Shuberts’ word for it, because there were no records showing you what seats were available. And then when a show actually arrived, the theater box office would tell you that the first twenty-one rows were already sold out, there was only room up in the back of the gallery. Of course, if you went down the street to a “ticket broker” - magically they had lots of good seats for that very same show you could buy, but at the brokers that five dollar ticket would cost you twenty-five, even thirty dollars. Fifty for two seats on the aisle. Now the Shuberts used to publicly moan and complain about these brokers - in New York and Boston, too - “These brokers, it all out of our control!” - but really, they owned the brokers, or at least split all proceeds with them. And it was a strictly cash business, and when it was time for the Shuberts to file income taxes: They had never seen that money, they knew nothing about it! That’s where the term “ice” came from - it was money that all just magically melted away. (But of course it really went somewhere - a side note here, after Lee Shubert died in the early 50s, three million dollars in cash was discovered in his office safe. Just sayin’.)

But this brings us back to the 1941 run of Life With Father, producer Oscar Serlin had brought his show successfully to Broadway, and while he was down in Washington DC, he mentioned all these facts to his good friend - a woman named Eleanor Roosevelt. Serlin stated flatly that the Shubert Organization was operating its business in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Mrs. Roosevelt tipped off the Justice Department, and thus an official government investigation was opened. At first, at least, the Shuberts and their lawyers were able to beat back the challenge - why it wasn’t a business, they claimed, it was just good old fashioned entertainment, a pastime, and like Baseball exempt from antitrust legislation. They found enough judges to agree with them . . for the moment.

[TRANSITION MUSIC - “Remember Pearl Harbor”]

America entered the war in December 1941, of course, after Pearl Harbor. One of the biggest effects of the war, immediately, on Philadelphia theater was that due to gasoline and rubber rationing, which put a crimp on private driving, many suburban and summer-stock companies had actually been performing in Philadelphia proper. The Bucks County Playhouse, for example, would stage shows in the ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel on Broad Street. And of course Philadelphia’s own Charlotte Cushman Club, now transformed into part of the American Theatre Wing, turned the ballroom of the Academy of Music into a Stage Door Canteen, where skits and musical acts for soldiers and sailors on leave in the city by the USO.

Now theater histories of the World War Two years point out that comedies like Life With Father tended to predominate in a time when people wanted relief from alarming news everywhere. Other stages were taken up with patriotic tributes that were raising funds for the war effort - even the Mastbaum Theatre on West Market Street was brought back to life to host extravaganzas like Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, which was produced by the American Army and featured the talents of 300 actors and entertainers who had been drafted. Soon afterwards, the long-running zany Vaudeville-style revue Hellzapoppin came to the Forrest Theatre, starring Jackie Gleason, for the second time that year. New companies of Life With Father kept coming back to town, too. Still, for all these shows, it was always a struggle to get tickets. The Philadelphia Record, a Democratic newspaper whose reporting we have not mentioned often enough in this podcast, was indignant about the black market for theater tickets in town. There was a black market for everything back in the early Forties, if you wanted rubber, gasoline, red meat, eggs, you really Had to Know a Guy. The Philadelphia Record wrote:

“No, don't give the average patron a crack at the good seats. Send them all to the ticket agents, who will bleed you of every last nickel. Don’t give ex-GI Joe a chance to buy a couple at the regular box office prices. Don’t give the tired war worker - looking for a few hours relaxation . . . don’t give him a fair shake. Entertainment is vital to our national morale!” The Record thundered.

But all these black market ticket agents, controlling access to all these comic and inspirational shows, so important to the national morale, didn’t stop some really earnest and serious work from being produced in Philadelphia during this War period, too.

For instance February 23, 1942: The national touring production of the plays Watch on the Rhine and Native Son opened on the very same Monday in Philadelphia.

To avoid having local theater critics having to choose between the two plays, the director of Native Son, Orson Welles - whose new movie Citizen Kane was just opening in Philadelphia’s movie theaters - consents to having Native Son premiere in a rare Monday afternoon matinee at the Walnut Street Theatre. It turned out this was a wise move, as the audience for the evening show was very meager.

Watch on the Rhine, (playing at the Locust Street Theatre) was Lillian Hellman's combination of drawing-room melodrama and political thriller, and had won the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play in 1941. Paul Lukas repeated his role as Paul Mueller, a German-born anti-fascist activist who kills a pro-Nazi spy in his own home, then enlists the help of his wife's American family to hide the murder so he can return to Europe to carry on the anti-fascist cause.

Native Son, starring the Black actor Canada Lee and adapted by African American novelist Richard Wright from his own novel, with the help of playwright Paul Green, and Native Son was slated to run for four weeks at the Walnut. Though the play's themes of interracial violence and political radicalism might have caused some censorship by Philadelphia authorities in the past, with a new liberal consensus increasingly making inroads into the diverse populations of Philadelphia, it played to enthusiastic crowds. The reviewer Linton Martin (here he is again!) in the Inquirer praised it as "grim and gripping", and praised both Welles' direction and Lee's acting. But at the end of his review he turned on the play itself: "Unquestionably," he wrote, "Native Son is a powerful play. But what purpose its presentation can serve is another matter."

The Philadelphia Tribune reviewer went to the sparsely attended evening show of Native Son, and pronounced the entire play, and Canada Lee’s performance as “superb.” The poor attendance on opening night he attributed to the fact that during these early months of World War II, many Philadelphians did not want to miss President Roosevelt’s weekly “fireside chat” on the radio.

[MUSIC UNDER, “The World At War” Theme]

November 13, 1944: D-Day had come and gone, and the war in Europe was raging towards the Rhine. On the Eastern front, the Russians were closing in on Budapest, and in the Pacific the Americans were sweeping towards Manilla, and preparing to attack the island of Iwo Jima.

The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play by a struggling young writer named Arthur Miller, opened at the Walnut. Miller, who had won several prizes for his student plays at college, was now 29 years old. He was married and had a newborn daughter to provide for, but he barely got by, working first for the Federal Theatre Project, and then writing radio dramas for CBS. He had adapted The Man Who Had All the Luck from his own unpublished novel. The story of a Midwestern auto mechanic who seems to be blessed by good fortune, while others around him collapse, it was a moral fable about the nature of fate and free will. Overall, it had a comic and light tone.

Arthur Miller was almost overshadowed in the billing by Joseph Fields (son of the famous vaudevillian Lew Fields and brother of the lyricist Dorothy Fields), who was making his debut as a director of the piece. Joe Fields believed in Artie Miller's play, however, and had worked his many New York connections, obtaining the financial backing of Herbert Harris, a perfume manufacturer.

Philadelphia reviewers quickly dismissed the new drama by the unknown playwright, however. "A naive little play," sniffed our friend Linton Martin in the Inquirer, with a "homespun quality." Martin later noted with some satisfaction that the play only ran for four performances, when Miller and Fields insisted on bringing it to New York. Philadelphia's record of good judgment about 'tryout plays' was proven, he felt, yet again.

The title of The Man Who Had All the Luck seemed to hold some significance for the struggling young writer. "When I began writing it," Miller later recalled, "despite every outward sign of failure my secret fate was full of promise." Several years before, he had won a prize for aspiring young playwrights from the Theatre Guild, and: "One of the other winners was a fellow from St. Louis with the improbable name of Tennessee Williams, whom I imagined in buckskins, and carrying a rifle" (remembered Miller). But by the fall of 1944 Williams' play The Glass Menagerie had become a major hit, while Miller's career was going nowhere.

After the failure of The Man Who Had All the Luck, in both Philadelphia and New York, Miller felt despondent. "Standing at the back of the house during the single performance I could bear to watch, I could blame nobody. . . . I would never write another play, that was for sure." He did remember that one New York reviewer had advised him to maybe try writing a tragedy next time. He seemed to have a better disposition for that.

[TRANSITION MUSIC - “Oklahoma” ]

But then in the summer of 1945, the war was over, and American show biz was still feeling the buzz of all the business that was coursing through Broadway. The raging success of Oklahoma! - which seemed to both fulfill Americans' demand for shows set in an idealized past, and yet have integrated songs and books, made producers eager to find more shows with Western themes and big name composers. (Especially enticing was that producers had found a new way to make money from hits - a Broadway Cast Album! - Oklahoma had led the way in that too.) One of the biggest new prospects for new musicals was a property called Annie Get Your Gun - about the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Rogers and Hammerstein were the producers, and the old hand Irving Berlin had come up with a score that had a lot of dynamite numbers for its star Ethel Merman - as well as the iconic rouser that we’re listening to now.

Annie Get Your Gun followed the same out of town tryout route that Oklahoma did - New Haven, Boston, and then by mid-April it was being loaded into the Imperial Theatre in New York. Now the Imperial Theatre was a fairly old house. As the stage hands began to load the scenery on the grid of the Imperial, suddenly - boom - a main structural girder across the top of the flies buckled and collapsed. The New York City building inspectors and the fire department were called, and they declared the theater unsafe for occupancy. It would take two weeks, minimum to fix the problem, reported the theater's manager to a livid Lee Shubert.

Now at this point I’m going to read to you directly from author Jerry Stagg’s 1968 book, The Brothers Shubert, because for this anecdote, I really can’t top the quality of his prose:

[NOTE: PASSAGE FROM THE BROTHERS SHUBERT NOT TRANSCRIBED]

That’s our show for today. We’ll be back next time with a roundup of the tryout shows that came through Philadelphia in the post-war period of the latter half of the 1940s. My plan is to keep going through the next Tryout decades, the 50s, 60s and eventually end up in the 70s and 80s by the end of June. Of course, I’m still working on the book project, so that’s taking up a lot of my time, but I promise that I’ll give it my best shot.

I’m so grateful for all the great feedback we’ve been getting from listeners about this topic! But I can always use more. If you’ve been enjoying this season of the podcast, or have any thoughts or suggestions, drop us an email at AITHpodcast@gmail dot com. We would love to hear from you! To support our show and to get access to bonus material and special insider info about Philly theater history, our Patreon page is Patreon dot com/AITHpodcast. Leave reviews on Apple Podcasts, follow us on Facebook and on Instagram and Mastodon, where we post new material every single day.

This is Peter Schmitz, the chief cook and bottle washer, as well as being the Resident Know-it-all Smartypants in Chief. The Sound editing and engineering for this episode was all done by My Humble Self, here at our studios in our World Headquarters high atop the Tower of Theater History.

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

[AITH END THEME]