Wars, fires, melodramas, circuses, balloons, and ice cream . . . plus, for even more excitement, an examination of the economic model of American theater.
Wars, fires, melodramas, circuses, balloons, and ice cream . . . plus, for even more excitement, an examination of the economic model of American theater.
Wars, fires, melodramas, circuses, balloons, and ice cream . . . plus, for even more excitement, an examination of the economic model of American Theater in its early years! Woohoo! They're all in this episode, as we complete our multi-episode exploration of Philadelphia Theater History in the period from 1793-1820.
To view the episode blog entry with illustrations, a map, and a bibliography, go to:
https://www.aithpodcast.com/blog/episode-11-The-Theatrical-Commonwealth/
If you liked the show, leave a Review on Apple Podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/adventures-in-theater-history-philadelphia/id1562046673
Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AITHpodcast
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aithpodcast/
Our website: https://www.aithpodcast.com/
To become a supporter the show, go to: AITHpodcast@patreon.com
© Podcast text copyright, Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.
℗ All voice recordings copyright Peter Schmitz.
℗ All original music and compositions within the episodes copyright Christopher Mark Colucci. Used by permission.
© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.
(© Podcast text copyright - Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.)
Hi everyone. Peter here - with a quick announcement. We are now on our eleventh episode, well into the double digits! Thank you to everyone who has been faithfully listening to the show and a special thanks to our Members on Patreon. If you’d like to check out the extra blog posts and bonus episodes on Patreon, too, we would welcome your support. It doesn’t take much, every little bit helps and is greatly appreciated. Or you know, you can also give a lot! As actors making a stage appeal often like to tell an audience, with a twinkle in their eye: Please Remember, No Donation Is Too Large. We want to especially thank Jim and Kate, for their pledge of ongoing support on Patreon, and we are grateful to Megan, who generously sent us a fascinating book about Philadelphia Theater history, one which I’ve already started mining for details and ideas. Thank you, thank you all. I am eternally grateful.
If you too want to do something concrete and substantial, but don’t have cash to spare, here’s what you can do, right now. - leave a review of the show on a podcasting app, whatever platform you are using, that is something really helpful that you can do for us, and it only costs you a minute of your time. Tell you what, you know . . . If you are listening to this show on your iMac computer or on your iPhone or any other Apple Device, and you’re using iTunes or Apple Podcasts, pause the show, right now, press Pause, and go do that. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of episodes, and give us some stars. Type in some nice words, if you can. I’ll wait for you to get back . . PAUSE . . Are you back? Okay thanks, so nice of you . . . now we can continue. Here we go . . .
[OPENING THEME]
Welcome and welcome and welcome again to Adventures in Theatre History: Philadelphia. Over these last ten episodes, I’ve been telling some of the stories of the first great High Period of Philadelphia theater, from 1793 to 1820, when the city really was at the center of the cultural life of the young American republic, in many respects. We left with the rather amazing story of how the skull of George Frederick Cooke went briefly back on the stage after his death, and then ended up in Philadelphia, on a shelf in a local medical college. I ought to mention, by the way, a recent communication I had this week from the delightfully named Michael Angelo, who is the Archivist and the Head of Historic Collections at Thomas Jefferson University’s Scott Memorial Library. He confirms to me that the item is NOT on public display, but here’s an amazing prospect: Mr. Angelo also informs me that he is making plans to have the skull scanned and possibly made available some day as a download to 3-D printers, so that any theater company producing Hamlet thatwants to use a facsimile of the Cooke skull in the role of Yorick can do so! Now that would be pretty amazing. I’ll keep you updated if I hear more. Okay, back to our story.
As the year 1811 ended, and as the year 1812 began, there was one more odd legacy of George Frederick Cooke to affect Philadelphia theater, if rather indirectly. We have the account, once again from the historian Charles Durang, who has been an invaluable guide to us in every episode we have released so far. Charles Durang, you will remember, was the eldest son of the dancer and performer John Durang, who along with most of the Durang family was in the regular employment of the Chestnut Street Theatre as dancers, singers, scene painters, whatever they needed. Charles was a young man just starting out on his own theater career, and in November of 1811 he had taken a job with Alexander Placide, a Frenchman who was then running a theater company that played in the Southern United States. The Warren & Wood New Theatre company had a monopoly on the Philadelphia/Baltimore/Washington market, and Placide was setting up a new circuit in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Placide’s newest venue, a theater in Richmond, Virginia, was being kept open for performances long past its usual end of the season, because George Frederick Cooke had promised him to perform there.
Remember that Cooke was in Philadelphia that November, on his second visit to the city. Charles Durang had been hired to drive Cooke down to Richmond in a carriage afterwards. But unfortunately a dinner and drinking party was held at the Mansion House Hotel first, meant to celebrate Cooke’s agreement with Placide and as you might predict, it went badly awry. As Cooke grew more intoxicated, his ill-tempered wit inevitably surfaced, and his animosity to foreigners increased. He declared that he would NEVER go to Richmond unless Placide immediately sang the song ‘God Save the King’ with all the proper words. Placide, who as a French American naturally did not really know the British anthem, made a Gallic-inflected botch of the words. Cooke was vitriolic: “Stop! You Yankee French man-a-ger! You in-sult an Englishman’s loyal feelings! You have insulted the feelings of George Frederick Cooke, and by the great Jehovah I won’t go with you!” And so, the actor refused to honor his commitment to tour the South.
Placide, like his fellow Frenchmen Pepin and Breschard in Philadelphia, was now bereft of any prospect of bringing a star performer to his new theater. He and Charles Durang returned to Richmond to close out the season with just the regular acting company. Matters were further delayed when a member of that acting company, Eliza Poe, suddenly died. After a suitable period of mourning for her, Placide felt he still owed his audience in Richmond a final show, so instead of the previously promised George Frederick Cooke in Richard III, he scheduled a farewell benefit performance of a holiday pantomime for families with children the day after Christmas - December 26, 1811.
During that show, however, a horrible disaster would occur. A candle flame that was part of a set piece came in contact with a curtain during a scene change. An actor quickly shouted there was a fire on stage, but some of the audience thought it was part of the show. They were soon to learn the awful truth when the terrified stage hands cut the ropes backstage, and the blazing scenery dropped to the floor. Smoke and gas billowed up to the top of the theater, smothering everyone in the upper galleries to death immediately. And as the rafters of the theater had unwisely been constructed of recently cut pine logs, quickly the whole roof of the building was ablaze, and searing pitch was dripping down onto the stage and into the house. Actors jumped out of dressing room windows, the audience ran for the exits, but the corridors were jammed and only so many could make it out in time. 72 people were killed, officially, including the sitting Governor of Virginia. 54 of these victims were women, most of them burned beyond recognition. Some say that the audience members in the segregated upper gallery, all of whom were African American, were never fully accounted for. For a long while Alexander Placide thought his own young daughter, whom he left in a dressing room, had been killed, but was relieved to find her waiting for him at home. He was never to recover his peace of mind after the disaster though, and died himself, within a year. It was a scene that perhaps only Eliza Poe’s son, Edgar Allen, could adequately - someday - describe in writing.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
But we must also remember, of course, that in that same week a new Philadelphia stage, the former circus on 9th and Walnut, was ready to open for the first time ever on New Years Day 1812! The newspaper ads were already being printed on December 31st, and unfortunately these ran right alongside the accounts of the Richmond fire. Here’s one such ad: “The managers of the Olympic Theatre, Messrs Pepin, Breschard and Beaumont, have the satisfaction of announcing to the public that the above theatre, being at an an enormous expense prepared for Dramatic Representation, will be opened on Wednesday Evening, January 1st, 1812” with Sheridan’s The Rivals: or, a Trip to Bath. Pepin and Breschard’s long-awaited expansion was finally ready, and their circus/theater could now start to bring them the revenue they had so long hungered for. In addition to Sheridan’s popular comedy, more feats of horsemanship were promised, and then an after piece called The Poor Soldier.
Meanwhile, the managers Warren and Wood, at the new Theatre on Chestnut, were not taking this new challenge to their primacy in the Philadelphia theatrical market lying down. On New Year's Day, said their own advertisement, they had scheduled “the first Night in America of the celebrated Dramatic Romance The Lady of the Lake, by John Edmund Eyre, based on the poem by Sir Walter Scott, with entirely new scenery, dresses and Decoration.” Of course, those of you listening may not be familiar with this play anymore, and that unlike The Rivals, that tried and true war horse of a comedy that the Olympic was trotting out, this was quite a fashionable and recent London hit. But you know, in fact you probably do know a tune from the show!
Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honored and bless’d be the ever-green Pine
. . well, I won’t sing any more - not because I don’t like singing, I do. but because, in fact, like the rest of you I only know the melody to the first two lines, and I had to look up the lyrics after those first four words. Anyway, by all accounts it was quite a spectacular show.
For the rest of the month of January 1812, the battle to attract the biggest audience continued between the two theater companies, with occasional sniping from yet another new venue, a converted house directly behind the Old Theatre in Southwark, called the Apollo Street Theatre, where variety acts, acrobats and musicians would perform on an irregular basis. Yet throughout all this month the stories continued to appear in all the Philadelphia newspapers about the rising death toll down in Virginia. The Olympic would advertise a lighthearted play called “Laugh While You Can '' and right near it on the page would be a heavy black headline DEPLORABLE CONFLAGRATION AT RICHMOND THEATRE. You can just imagine the conversation around the breakfast table: “It says that fifty bodies can’t be identified at all, and will be buried in a common grave beneath a new church to be built on the site!” “Quite dreadful” “Simply shocking! I would like to take my mind off of it. Shall we go to the Olympic tonight dear? They’re doing the Spoiled Child and then the horses will jump through rings of fire!” “Rings of Fire, did you say? Er, well perhaps not tonight, my love.” And every Sunday, Protestant ministers were delivering sermons to their congregations that the Richmond Fire was surely divine judgment upon the immorality of the theater itself.
Actually the Olympic Theatre was not doing too badly, in terms of box office. That first performance of The Rivals brought in 1400 dollars. Perhaps their natural crowds were not the newspaper reading or church-going type. The vivid melodramas, popular plays, and patriotic equestrian spectacles that Pepin and Breschard were offering seemed to have their appeal all through the winter season. Or perhaps they really were stealing the New Theatre’s audience, as their managers, so used to their longtime monopoly, had always feared. A February production at the Olympic of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, a difficult show the New Theatre had never attempted, also got a good box office on Walnut Street, due to the addition of extravagant costumes and sets by the architect William Strickland, and horses in the scenes at King Leontes’ court.
Over on Chestnut Street, Warren and Wood looked gloomily at the prospects for the rest of their season. A downturn was continuing to depress the local economy, war seemed to be looming with Great Britain, the circus was taking their audience. And now the newspapers would not stop printing the words Theatre and Fire. “This awful event would alone have arrested for a season a current of the best fortune,” sighed Wood in his memoir. “It seemed to create a perfect panic, which deterred the largest portion of the audience for a long time from venturing into a crowd, either theatrical, or other.” For many weeks thereafter Warren and Wood at the New Theater would have to regularly reassure their patrons from the stage before the show that they had firefighters positioned in the house, and in fact an entire volunteer fire company had taken residence directly next door.
But here’s the thing that was really bugging Warren and Wood. All the actors now performing at the Olympic Theatre? Those were their former employees. The New Theatre was having trouble retaining its lower and mid-level performers. One of their reliable actors of several years, a Scotsman named Donald McKenzie, had openly rebelled against them, defecting to the Olympic Theater, breaking his contract, and encouraging his fellow Scotsmen in the city to riot and demonstrate during Wood’s performances in the Fall of 1811. But now it was even worse. All the performers acting in The Rivals on Walnut Street: Mr Tyler, Mr. McKenzie, Mr. Dwyer, Mr and Mrs. Wilmot, Mrs. Bray - they had formerly been part of the company at the Chestnut, but complaining that they could not seem to ‘advance’ into larger roles, had decamped to the Olympic on Walnut. Even Charlotte Melmoth, a highly experienced actress who had played for many years in both Philadelphia and New York, was portraying Mrs. Malaprop! Oh it gave them the hydrostatics, to such a degree!
Warren and Wood could not understand exactly what was going on, but they had their suspicions. First was the local theater critics, whom they thought tended to praise lesser performers in the company unduly, just to make a fetish out of their superior and specialized taste in dramatic arts. This gave some actors ideas beyond their station, after all. Mr. Carpenter, at the Mirror of Taste, was the worst of these, they thought. Although he had praised George Frederick Cooke to the skies, he had taken a violent dislike to the theater’s star comedian Joseph Jeferson, and instead kept suggesting that other bit players could do his roles better. Most impertinent.
What the New Theater was seeing was the result of a long-building resentment on the part of the rest of its stock company, those who were usually never or rarely assigned any leading roles, which usually went to Warren, Wood, Mrs. Wood, and Jefferson. Or, even worse, these parts would go to any barnstorming English or New York star, like Cooke and Cooper. If you had been pegged as someone who was willing to accept small roles, well then, that was what you did from then on. You would never take center stage yourself. Explained Charles Durang, who had no pretensions to being a great actor himself, but had a very watchful eye on the doings of his erstwhile employers:
“The Chestnut Street Theatre was an excellent school for novices in those days, but a sad place for the young aspirant’s ambitious views. There seemed an insuperable bar to promotion in that ancien regime to the minor performer. ‘Once a captain always a captain - once a private, always a private.’ That was the maxim of the old Chestnut street cabinet. These fogy ideas bred great discontent among the secondary people.” Furthermore, thought Durang, there was a decided bias against native born actors like him: “The notion of an American having talent was then deemed eminently utopian. Some of us wild young Americans would venture to indulge in prophetic speculation as to the future of the drama, but we were only laughed at or sneered at. . . . How men [like Warren, Wood, and Jefferson] who came hither from England, with good sense of observation and education, having their own children born here, could indulge in such fantasies, I never could understand. But such is the mystery of national prejudice.” Durang archly noted that those prejudices tended to disappear when these children, the young Warrens, Woods and Jeffersons, all American born, grew up and wanted to enter into the theater themselves, of course.
By the summer of 1812, the public horror over the Richmond fire had faded, but of course there was now the prospect of War, which was declared in July. Theater attendance all over the country dropped precipitously. Pepin and Breschard’s fortunes never recovered from this blow. They had broken up their circus company into smaller units and tried to tour, but they found it rough going. Along with Alexander Placide, they opened a theater in New York, also called The Olympic, and moved the company there, but that faltered when Mrs. Melmoth broke her arm in a carriage accident, and then the unfortunate Placide got sick and died of pneumonia. Their renovated Philadelphia theater was mostly dark and unused in the summer and Fall of 1812 - we have noted back in Episode 7 that on September 3rd, it was easily rented for a one time dance performance by a group of travelling Native Americans. By October 15, 1812, Breschard and Pepin closed their theater, and in February 1813 it was seized by their creditors and sold at auction. There were no buyers, so their principal creditor, a flour merchant named James Clemson, took control of it and rented it out to the occasional rope-dancer or acrobatic troupe. The two Frenchmen continued to perform there, sporadically, but by December 1813 they had given their last show together at the Olympic. They broke up their circus company and the two men set out separately into the Western and Southern states.
In 1813 and 1814, therefore, even though the war between Britain and America continued to rage well past its eponymous year, theater in Philadelphia was in a sad state. Once again, despite its largely British management and mindset, the New Theatre did its best, staging many popular patriotic tributes to American heroes who had scored victories over the British Navy, though it stayed mostly quiet about the defeats. True, some of its American members, like Charles Durang and his brother Ferdinand, enlisted in the American Army for a period, and some of its British actors found it convenient to leave America entirely during the hostilities. A large portion of the New Theater’s costumes and sets from its Baltimore house were even burned in a Maryland warehouse by the marauding Admiral Cochrane in 1814. Manager William Warren blamed the politicians for getting the country into war in the first place. “All of this might have been avoided had wisdom and not passion prevailed in the councils of the nation,” he harrumphed in his diary.
The rebellion by his discontented actors had continued during the time of war, and in 1813 these rebels had formed a company of their own, led by William Twaits, another disgruntled employee. Tired of the petty fines, favoritism in casting and star system profiteering of the management of New York and Philadelphia theaters, they called themselves “The Theatrical Commonwealth”, pledging to share the proceeds of their box office equitably amongst all the members of the company. I mean it’s not like they were proto-Socialists, or anything like that. To their minds, they were merely trying to reinstate the old sharing system that many groups of European actors had operated under during the 16th & 17th Centuries. It was, in fact, the system that the Hallam Company had used when it first toured America in the middle of the 18th Century. But as theater companies began to settle down into American cities on a more permanent basis, that earlier economic model had been abandoned, both in England and America, as managers who organized their stock company on the weekly salary/annual benefit model took over. “Forfeits” or fines could be imposed by management if an actor misbehaved in the Green Room, or was even late for an entrance. And disparities in income between the upper and lower classes of actors, as it were, began to increase.
I’d like to talk about the Theatrical Commonwealth for a minute, because it’s usually given short shrift in the history books as being a group of hopeless dreamers or pitiful malcontents. Led, as I said, by the actor William Twaits, who along with his wife had once been a regular company member on Chestnut Street, it had attempted to rally public opinion to their side on the grounds of democratic and egalitarian principles. Not just actors, but in fact scene painters and musicians from the New Theatre joined them. They rented the Old Theater on South Street (by this point a long-serving venue for all marginal and striving entertainers in the city) and published an appeal that Twaits had written to Philadelphia playgoers:
“Reliance is placed in that general sympathy which feels indignant at the outrages of oppression. [Actors] are the only profession in the happy country over whom tyranny has dared to assume a lawless power under the specious garb of government and order. The most injudicious and offensive laws have been promulgated by the managerial despots . . . so that, in the theatrical world, submission to injustice is the price of existence. . . They trust a portion of public attention will accompany their efforts, and ultimately produce an honorable independence . . . They are conscious that, at present, their numbers are circumscribed; and they regret their lack of skill, but they pledge themselves to exert their powers they possess for the satisfaction of their patrons.”
Moving words, today. But in the early 19th century, as you might expect, such an organization quickly faltered on the rocks of complete public indifference. It turned out that no one actually cared about how a theater company was paid and organized. The Theatrical Commonwealth played in New York City for a few months, then returned to Philadelphia actually took over the vacant Olympic Theatre on Walnut Street in early 1814, offering such novel but rather obscure plays as The Honey Moon, Rugatino, Bravo of Venice, and The Students of Salamanca - but just like those titles, the company soon sank into oblivion, and their brave leader, Williams Twaits, succumbed to the chronic asthma with plagued him. He died later that year in New York.
But the idea of a Theatrical Commonwealth has a certain appeal, even today. After all, why exactly does every entertainment organization and sports team have to have ‘owners’ and ‘producers’? Shouldn’t arts workers not be alienated from access to the means of their productions, to coin a phrase? Or perhaps American theater, instead of hewing to the British economic model, could have been organized in a way that didn’t involve years of obscure labor for so many, resulting in only a pauper’s grave? William Wood, in his memoirs, harrumphed that if only actors would be individually responsible, they could certainly prosper and die rich. Wood literally spends pages listing off the names of actors who carefully saved and invested and left their families comfortably provided for. Those actors who died poor, or who left the business, or who never ‘advanced’, or died young, well, that was sad wasn’t it? But they shouldn’t have been so foolish as to not be chosen as leading performers! It didn’t seem to occur to him that there was any other way of doing things. Virtue and talent were always rewarded, he felt, if people were careful and judicious and good with numbers, like him.
Playwright and author William Dunlap, (whom we first met in the very first episode of this show writing a joke that made George Washington laugh, and whom we last saw taking care of George Frederick Cooke and writing the story of how that great man drank away his money and his health and died in wretched conditions) - Dunlap wrote a book in 1832 called A History of American Theatre. He had literally been watching American drama develop since 1776, so he had some standing, and after sixty years he wondered if there wasn’t another way. His takeaway from the story of the Theatrical Commonwealth was not that it was misguided, but that it was impossible, seeing how British and American society failed to adequately support the majority of theater artists both financially and spiritually. If profits were the ultimate goal, then art would suffer, he felt. An entire chapter of his history is devoted to advocating for a state or community-supported model of the theater, as was then being done in France and many principalities of Germany. Wrote Dunlap:
“The expenses of a theatre, governed by the state, or by an enlightened and patriotic association, would be defrayed by the visitors - but profit should not be the object - loss should not be feared. Men of learning, and belles lettres scholars would be the directors and writers - they would be made independent. Actors who are artists, and scholars, would be the performers - equally made independent. Every abuse would vanish. The theatre would be a temple of the muses, the graces, and the virtues.”
Very Platonic of Dunlap - a theater of Philosopher Kings, so to speak. We all know now, of course, that in America there would NEVER be a real public commitment to supporting the performing arts. Maybe if the national capital had never moved away from Philadelphia in 1800, that would have turned out differently, but there’s no way of knowing, now. Market forces prevail in this country, at both the popular and elite level - even in the so-called ‘non-profit’ theaters of today. But it’s interesting to note that other people noticed the problem, right at the very beginning of things. This is not a new conversation.
And those who wish to argue for the profit motive as a driver of innovation and excitement in the theater, well, you’re about to have your justification, too! It’s too bad the Theatrical Commonwealth no longer had access to equestrian entertainments and too bad for Pepin and Breschard that their historical timing was so off. Because as soon as the Napoleonic wars in Europe ended, trans-Atlantic ship traffic was free of all the marauding privateers. By 1816, another circus company came to town!
This time the circus was English, and was headed by James West. West’s company, like Ricketts, before him, had only been a minor figure in Britain, and was striking out to America to make his fortune. He was expert in all the current fashions in the London entertainment world, where increasingly performing animals were being brought directly onto the stage. In fact, he was bringing with him the newest sensation from the London Theater scene: Hippodrama!
Hippodrama, of course, does not mean plays with hippos. Hippopotamuses are notoriously hard to manage onstage, after all, they never hit their marks and they simply won’t take direction. No, in this case ‘hippo’, of course, is Greek for horse. In Europe melodramas which used horses onstage were filling houses everywhere, at a time when classical written drama was otherwise a bit moribund and not well attended. Even Covent Garden and Drury Lane had found it expedient to add horses to such shows as Blue Beard, and to begin to stage equestrian melodramas like Timour the Tartar. When West arrived in Philadelphia, he booked the vacant Olympic Theatre in the Autumn of 1816 as the natural place to exhibit his company’s talents, which included a Mr. Campbell, an extremely talented clown, for comic skits.
Timour the Tartar had already been staged by Pepin and Breschard’s Circus at the Olympic, but general wartime nervousness had kept the audience’s low. West’s new production, along with his exhibitions of grand military horsemanship, was evidently much grander and even more elaborately staged, and in peacetime illusions of battlefields, waterfalls and ocean cliffs were very appealing. Timour is set in medieval Poland, during the time of the Mongol invasions. The plot, like that of many melodramas, is so complex and exciting - involving stories of thwarted young lovers, warfare, rescues, and near-death experiences, that it would take much too long to explain here. Suffice it to say that at the climactic moment of the show, the heroine, Zorilda, jumps into the sea to escape her captors, and then the hero Agib, on horseback, plunges into the sea after her. The two lovers arising from the water on the back of the horse brought an ecstatic reaction from the house. Charles Durang once again provides a great description of the scene:
[Quotation not transcribed]
Night after night, West’s equestrian company packed the Olympic theater. Campbell’s benefit night earned $1700 alone. Over on Chestnut Street, houses were sparse in comparison, and manager William Wood was in agonies. We even have a torn scrap of paper from him on which he desperately scribbled down comparative box office figures between the two houses. He figured that the Olympic had grossed over $21,000 in twenty-seven performances, while his own house averaged about $569 a night. And it wasn’t simply a matter that the Chestnut Street company was offering ‘highbrow’ material while the equestrian circus was popular fare meant to appeal to broader tastes. Indeed, noted Wood, it was his high-end audiences in the boxes that deserted the most go see Zorilda being rescued from the waves. In the following seasons, Warren and Wood realized they needed to follow the dictates of the audience, and began scheduling more operas, spectacles and melodramas. They invested money in their infrastructure, modernizing the theater by adding a gas heating system to warm up the house in the winters, and for the first time in any American Theater, gas lights illuminated the stage. To appeal to local audiences, they changed the name of the company from the New Theatre to The Philadelphia Theatre, and they began to bring horses onto the Chestnut Street stage, too. Their annual production of Blue Beard: or Female Curiosity even included a pair of Learned Elephants! Now I would have paid to see that, too, I suppose.
But nobody, even the discontented actors of the city, attempted to repeat the efforts of the now disbanded Theatrical Commonwealth. It was a noble experiment, but really, you won’t entice many people to come inside a theater with a plea for economic equality and social justice. That’s a tactic for a political meeting, and not a famous tactic for filling the theater. You gotta promise the folks a great show, or put horses and elephants on the stage, or give your audience door prizes, or I dunno, ice cream.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
Ice cream, in fact, is exactly what some other new entrants into Philadelphia theater and popular entertainment were offering! During this period in both New York and Philadelphia, businesses calling themselves Pleasure Gardens were opening up on the edges of the city, where the buildings gave way to the countryside. In a time before there were public parks, these privately owned pleasure gardens were large landscaped green spaces, where in the evenings and weekends the urban populations could escape the close confines of the tightly packed business district. Once again, in this respect they were following London fashions, and often even named the pleasure gardens Vauxhall, after the great pleasure garden on the banks of the Thames River. In Philadelphia these spaces were not along the river, but inland, to the west and north of the built up area. They were usually surrounded by a high fence, and like a theater you had to pay at the door to get in, but once inside you could enjoy the lawns, shrubbery, shaded walks, hanging lanterns, fountains, cool drinks, food - and entertainment.
One of the first was the Columbian Gardens, opened in 1813 on the north side of 13th and Market streets, next to the Center Square where City Hall now sits. Owned and operated by Laurence Astolfi, a confectioner and distiller. From an open stage surrounded by terraces of tables and chairs, he offered the public fireworks displays and evenings of songs, performing acrobats, light dramatic entertainments, and patriotic illuminated transparencies. And of course there was strawberry ice cream for sale! Ice cream, formerly only a delicacy in the houses of rich people, was now becoming a mass-produced treat, and would have been a great drawing point for the family crowd, perhaps even more than the performers. By 1820 it had been renamed the Tivoli Gardens and even had an indoor winter counterpart, a theater on Prune Street to the east of Washington Square. (On the blog on the podcast’s website AITHpodcastcom, you can see a map that I’ve borrowed and adapted from an article on Philadelphia’s pleasure gardens by the scholar Anne Beamish. It shows the locations of all Philadelphia’s theaters and pleasure gardens in the early decades of the 19th Century.)
The Columbian Gardens biggest competition was the Quaker City’s version of the Vauxhall Gardens - on the northeast corner of Walnut and Broad Street, right where the huge Wells Fargo Bank building is today. Its first manager was also Italian, a perfumer and hairdresser named Giovanni Scotti. Signor Scotti had labored long and hard for over a year at creating a beautiful space for Philadelphians, and when it finally opened in 1815, it was widely hailed as a quite fashionable and agreeable resort. In addition to its green spaces with trees hung with thousands of lanterns in the evenings, it had a huge and elegant pavilion with an open air theater, in which were held balls, concerts, and public dances. In 1818, Scotti sold the business to one Charles Magner, who poured even more money into staging grand entertainments. Some of the former members of the Theatrical Commonwealth, such as John Dwyer, now found gainful employment as a singer and comic monologist, delivering that familiar variety show act called a “Lecture on Heads”. For a particular sensation, such contraptions as velocipedes (an early version of the bicycle), would be exhibited, and professional balloonists would inflate their crafts on the Vauxhall Garden grounds, and then sail off into the sky. Crowds on such occasions were often immense, and on one occasion, I’m sorry to say, things got very out of control.
On September 8, 1819, an “Aerostatic Exhibition” was offered at the Vauxhall Gardens, starring a French balloonist named Michel. M. Michel, it was stated, would inflate and ride in his hot air balloon above the city, and then jump out with a parachute and descend to earth again. To get inside the fenced area and listen to an orchestra concert while watching the initial proceedings of the balloon’s inflation, you had to pay a dollar and about 600 people did. Thousands of people, of course, who would rather watch the show for free, gathered outside the fence, in the middle of the then mostly vacant and unused expanse of Broad Street. Inside employees would poke and shove and any of the non-paying crowd who got too near the fence. They were met with showers of stones by the indignant crowd, who naturally did not like being shoved. It is likely that one of the stones pierced the balloon as it was filling up, and hot air began escaping. The balloon sagged, and after several hours it looked as if it would never get off the ground, much to everyone’s annoyance. One young boy tried to get a little higher to take a better look, and shimmied up the fence. To get him down from seeing the show without paying, the miscreant was prodded with sticks by the garden’s staff, and the boy fell heavily to the ground. Word quickly spread through the crowd that the boy was dead, and indignant feelings rose to a fever pitch. The crown became a mob. The fence surrounding the garden was ripped down, and thousands of people poured into the park. As patrons and musicians scattered, the mob tore up the balloon, the parachute and everything else they could get their hands on. The bar was raided and all the liquor in it distributed and quickly consumed. All the hanging lanterns were torn down, and someone applied one of the flames to the pavilion. Soon everything was ablaze, rioters were running amok, and the entire pavilion and theater of Vauxhall Gardens was on fire and quickly consumed.
As a portent of things to come, this riot and fire was an ominous sign. Civil unrest, political riots, mobs, and deliberately set conflagrations were going to be part of the Philadelphia scene for the next 30 years or so. Things were changing in the city. Immigration was increasing, tensions between Catholics and Protestants were rising, industrial workers were struggling to get living wages in the post war economy. Formal exclusion of African-Americans from jobs and civic life, always bad, got even worse.
As we shall see in our next episode, these rising urban tensions were causing all sorts of moral panics among the white middle and upper classes in Philadelphia. And then there was the downturn in the economy, again. Without the presence of more travelling circuses, an attempt by some to set up a rival acting company at the Olympic Theatre went totally bankrupt. By 1818 it was bought out by a consortium of 115 local merchants and bankers. For the first time ever, legal documents referred to the building specifically as the “Walnut Street Theatre”. Meanwhile, attendance at the renamed Philadelphia Theatre on Chestnut Street dipped noticeably in the 1819-1820 season. Even the innovation of gas lights, more stars, more novelties, and more melodramas failed to attract crowds. The average house brought in less than $400. The lesser members of the company noted with sour satisfaction that William Warren, one of their two bosses, had such a poor payout from his own Benefit Night, that he was forced to hold a second one, but he only got an additional $274.
Management decided to close the Philadelphia Theatre somewhat early that season; on March 27th 1820, they ended with a performance of a comedy entitled The Soldier’s Daughter. Warren and Wood, as usual, assigned themselves the two leading roles, and Joseph Jefferson and his wife were also given large parts. After a musical interlude in which ‘The Echo Song’ was performed by a Miss Burke, the New York star Henry Wallack appeared in a melodrama called The Ruffian Boy.
After the final curtain, the company left their longtime home theater in Philadelphia behind, and traveled to Baltimore the next day, hoping for better fortune. But the weather was unseasonably cold, and a spring snowstorm kept the audiences mostly at home. Then on the morning of April 3rd, William Wood was awakened at his Baltimore hotel by a knock on his bedroom door. It was the company prop manager, with a solemn face and a packet of letters. He handed them to Wood. On the outside of the top envelope was a scribbled note from Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Benjamin Franklin, and then the Postmaster of Philadelphia.
“ Dear Wood, this letter bears sad news for you. Early last evening, your beautiful theatre was wholly consumed by fire.”
The premier theater of America, which had stood on Sixth and Chestnut since 1793, and that was at the center of so many of our last few episodes, was no more. What had happened?
Tune in next time, when we explore the circumstances of that unfortunate theater fire, and many other theater fires that were to occur in Philadelphia over the next few decades. It’s quite a story.
I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History: Philadelphia.
[END MUSIC]