Above, a candid shot of the Philadelphia audience - which I believe is from the opening night of Poor Bitos in February of 1966, at the moment when the lightbulbs flashed in their eyes to momentarily distract them during the set change at the end of…
A photo of Celia Silverman and Jean Goldman, sitting in the seats of the newly-created Theatre of the Living Arts. This was the opening page of an article about the TLA in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine on February 28th, 1965. Below, a page from…
Above, an architect's conception of the new permanent building for the Playhouse in the Park in 1958. The old "sheep barn" - which had acted as a summer "little theater" in the 1920s - is in the foreground. In the upper left corner of the imag…
Bernard Havard in his office at the Walnut Street Theatre, looking at a wall of historical theater artifacts and personal memorabilia. He seems to be looking at a copy of a newspaper cartoon from the 1850s, showing Edwin Forrest (in costume as…
Philadelphia Mayor Samuel Davis Wilson being kissed by two women, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new Florsheim shoe store - March 20, 1937. (Image courtesy of Explore PA History)It's nice to find a photo of Mayor Wilson looking happy, because …
Above, Producer Earl Carroll Signs up a local dancer to be in the touring production of his show Earl Carroll Vanities, 1925. Below, the dancer - and Carroll's current girlfriend - Kathryn Ray on the cover of racy publication The National Police Gaz…
Above left: The actors Sara Allgood ("Widow Quin") and J. M. Kerrigan ("Shawn Keogh"), in the Irish Player's 1911 production of The Playboy of the Western World. Above right: a photo published in many American newspapers as word spread about the con…
The two men who were the commanding generals of the The Opera War (as the newspapers loved to call it) between the Metropolitan Opera and the Manhattan Opera/Philadelphia Opera Company - financier Otto Kahn (1867-1934) in his dapper overcoat and bow…
The dancer Maud Allan in her vaudeville performance of "The Vision of Salome" at London's Palace Theatre in 1908. Allan (1873-1956), a Canadian, danced her interpretation of Salome at theaters worldwide - amazingly, she was actually performing tople…
The header image is the newly-completed Philadelphia Opera House in 1908 (courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries). This is followed by a composite drawing of the opera house, Oscar Hammerstein, and the soprano Mari…
