Season Three: The Tryout Town

Copyright 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome back 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 music for our podcast, including this new intro theme for our Season Three, is composed by Christopher Mark Colucci.

[TRYOUT TOWN THEME MUSIC]

This is the first official adventure of our Third Season, which we are calling: “The Tryout Town”!
 
So to celebrate the significance of the occasion, we’re going to start this premiere episode with a bit of a treat for you, an audio selection from the 1933 movie 42nd Street. 

Now for those of you who are theater nerds, or classic Hollywood movie film buffs, or are disturbingly knowledgeable about American musical theater history (and I must admit I fall somewhat into all of those camps), this scene is very familiar. But I’m amazed that more people don’t know this film. Because you really should, it’s fascinating and delightful and horrifying all the same time. As the New Yorker magazine film critic and historian Richard Brody described the film’s significance:

“42nd Street rescued the musical genre, which had been done to death in the early days of talking pictures. With three spectacular production numbers, the film captured the first full flowering of Busby Berkeley’s geometrical and symbolic, and macabre and erotic, imagination. But for the bulk of the movie, 42nd Street is a dramatic comedy of backstage life, chronicling the making of a Broadway musical called “Pretty Lady.”

To quickly summarize the plot of the movie, a pair of scrappy Broadway producers somehow get the money to hire the visionary, but rather tyrannical, director Julian Marsh (played by Warner Baxter) to stage their show. With the help of a talented but wolfish dance director named Andy Lee (who is rather reminiscent of the real life Busby Berkely, really), he assembles a chorus that includes the naïve young newcomer and top-flight tap dancer Peggy Sawyer (played by Ruby Keeler, in her first big role). When the Broadway grande dame Dorothy Brock breaks an ankle the night before the opening, Peggy is plucked from the chorus and thrust into the lead role, and her triumph marks the show as a hit. Ginger Rogers, Una Merkel and Dick Powell all have important parts in it, too

The movie is now in the public domain, thank goodness, and if you don’t want to wait for it to crop on the TCM playlist, you can easily watch it online - there’s a link in the show notes. I’m going to play you a minute long clip from a very specific scene in the movie - it’s just after the dress rehearsal, which has gone terribly, and the director Julian Marsh is yelling in frustration at the entire company, who have all been gathered by Stage Manager, and are lined up on stage in front of him. Una Merkel and Ginger Rogers are standing side by side, gossiping, and the leading lady Dorothy Brock (played by Bebe Daniels), is looking very concerned.

[CLIP FOLLOWS]

Baxter (as Julian Marsh): “And is this what you call a finale? What is this, Amateur Night? Have we been rehearsing for five weeks, or did I dream it? May I remind all you shining lights that this is the company that opens tomorrow night? I am in the right theater, am I not? This is the Pretty Lady company, isn’t it? The All-Star show that opens in Philadelphia tomorrow night?

[Crown noise, full of consternation - we can hear the word Philadelphia being repeated in shock]

Stage Manager: Quiet! Quiet!

Merkel [scornfully]: Philadelphia PA . . 

Rogers [snidely]: Yeah, and on Sundays - it’s PU. [Laughter from the company]

Stage Manager: Quiet! Quiet!

Bebe Daniels [as Dorothy Brock]: Julian, you mean Atlantic City, don’t you? 

Baxter: I mean Philadelphia. Train leaves one p.m., Penn Station. Full dress rehearsal, four o’clock, Arch Street Theatre.

Daniels: But I . . . I don’t want to go to Philadelphia!

Baxter: Who does?

Daniels: But why Philadelphia?

Baxter: Well . . When you become stage director, we’ll open in your apartment, if you say so. But right now, it’s Philadelphia! [To the company, trailing off] You’ve got the call, read the call board . .

Daniels (annoyed): Of all the cities in the United States, he would pick Philadelphia . . 

[Crowd noises, chatter]

Stage Manager: All right, now listen to me! We open in the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia tomorrow night! . .

Peter: Isn’t that delightful? I must admit I howl with laughter every time Baxter says “who does?” and I’m willing to bet that a lot of you did, too.

So let’s unpack what’s going on in this scene. Why is everyone so upset when the director announces they’re going to Philly? What’s wrong with Philadelphia on Sundays - what stunk about it so much that it was considered “PU”? And did Broadway shows really make it a practice to “try out” at our old friend, the Arch Street Theatre, which had been hosting plays, including those of Mrs. Louisa Lane Drew, since the 1820s? What the heck was Tryout Town, anyway? Why was the company of Pretty Lady going to one at all?  Here we have a fully produced show and a completely rehearsed Broadway company in New York City. They’re literally in a Broadway theater right at that moment! Why are they going anywhere, let alone Philadelphia?

So many questions!

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Okay, here we go, let’s take them all one by one. First of all, why was the company of Pretty Lady leaving town to present their play in another city, before staging it in New York?

Well, for those of you who are longtime listeners to the podcast, I point you back to our Episode 20, when we discuss the career of Lousia Lane Drew, the Duchess of the Arch Street Theatre. You’ll remember that by the 1870s, she had largely disbanded her old Philadelphia stock company of players, because now the overwhelming trend in American theater was now “combination companies” - big, single show productions that traveled to almost every city in the company, stopping in local theaters they had booked along the way? Well, almost ALL of these combinations came out of New York City, which at this point in time was the overwhelming leader in artistic taste and commercial power in the nation. Admittedly there were a few combinations that started in Chicago or Boston, but overwhelmingly most of them started in New York. Almost no original combination shows came out of Philadelphia any more, and if they did, they might have a minor success in cities like Buffalo or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but they would literally get laughed right out of New York by the Gotham newspaper critics, if they dared to come that way. Mrs Drew’s may once have been a standard of quality for Philadelphia theater - but no more. In fact, Philly theater managers were desperate for touring New York shows to come down to them.

And almost every show that came through Philadelphia, at all its many many professional houses in the late 19th Century, as we detailed in our Episode 30 “The Best of Times” came out of New York. Philadelphia audiences, and audiences almost everywhere else in America felt reassured that if a show came from New York, if it had met the test of Manhattan tastemakers, well then it was worth spending money and time on.  Some of these had, in fact, first been seen in other cities, including Philadelphia, in their earliest incarnations - but they had to go through New York to get that boost.

Even our dubious hero, John A. Arneaux, from Episodes 28 and 29, about “The Black Booth” was able to attract a large audience of Philadelphia's Black community at the Academy of Music in 1887, because he had previously performed the role of Richard III in New York! By the 1890s, Philadelphia stages were awash with touring New York plays, musicals and shows, and even international stars from England and France. The ease of transportation on America’s huge railway network made this all possible. In fact most shows made MOST of their money on the road, not in New York. And everyone from Edwin Booth the Sara Bernhardt to Joseph Jefferson III were touring, constantly touring, going from one city to the next. And indeed it was regarded as the true test of an actor’s ability to sustain a performance, to meet the crowds in all of these varied cities and bring them pleasure and delight. In some ways it was harder. There was a saying in the theater “that you can get away with murder in New York, but on the road they find you out.”

Now quite often shows would be given a “trial run” outside of New York. As early as 1862 Augustin Daly’s play Leah the Forsaken had an opening run at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston. In 1877 a show called Ah Sin, by Bret Harte and Mark Twain opened first at the National Theatre in Washington DC before going on to Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. But trial performances, as they called them, were rare before 1890, when the producer Charles Frohman began to employ them regularly with shows like The Heart of Maryland which played both Washington and Baltimore. Charles Hoyt’s A Day and Night in New York - a behind-the-scenes drama, whose action, like the later 42nd Street, was set in a New York Theater - came to Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in 1898 before moving back to the actual New York.

But things would really change, as we take the story into the very early 20th Century. You’ll also remember back in our Episode 43, when we talked about the Theatrical Syndicate - that combination of Philadelphia, New York and West Coast theater owners who had supposedly ‘rationalized’ the entire theatrical marketplace in the nation,had literally cornered the market on theatrical bookings, making sure that no combination company could be left without a booking somewhere, and blackballing any independent producer who bucked their control. Why heck, even the infamous and odious play The Clansman, whose story we told in Episodes 42, 43, and 45, was a good example of this phenomenon - from 1906 on it started in New York, attracted a lot of publicity (some of it very negative, but all of it driving ticket sales) and then it sent out TWO touring companies, each with that New York imprimatur, as it went from cities in the Northeast to those of the Deep South.

So there it is - almost every production in America tended to travel. Indeed it was a rare commercial show that could be seen only in New York - no matter how technically complex it was, and how daunting it was to transport it. Moving shows around the country was an industry all its own, in fact, there were dozens of Theatrical transfer companies, whose special business was the shipping and transportation of sets, costumes and equipment from city to city. By October of the year 1900 the huge production of Ben Hur - the massive staging of General Lew Wallace’s novel - came down from New York to Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Opera House with a cast of 350 people (or so the producers claimed) that would provide Philadelphia with a chance to see it.

[MUSIC, UNDER] 

Their advertisements for the show advised the theater-going public that the three and a half hour-long spectacle had strict requirements. "The curtain will rise PRECISELY AT 8 O'CLOCK at the evening and at 2 O'CLOCK at the matinees. As it is necessary to darken the entire auditorium during the Prelude, showing the beautiful STAR OF BETHLEHEM and WISE MEN OF THE EAST. It is respectfully requested that patrons may be seated before the hours mentioned."

But if you had come late, there was more to see - there were seventeen spectacular settings in the epic drama set, like the novel it was based on, in Biblical times. Because this was Philadelphia, with its well-known cadre of powerful Protestant ministers who objected to any depictions of Jesus on the stage, there was a particular disclaimer in the ads:

“There being considerable reference to religious matters in the book, great care has been taken in the dramatization to exclude from the play any religious incidents which, if placed on the stage, might give offense. In the miracle of the cleansing of the lepers the presence of the Saviour is only represented by a shaft of light," assured the play's publicist. It was all to be capped, of course, by the chariot race in which moving horses seemed to run right at the audience.

"The illusion of their headlong dash is intensified by a moving panorama," reported the Philadelphia Times, "which makes the horses appear to be going forward, though they are really always galloping over the same space." Buy your tickets now, advised the Times, "Ben Hur's stay in this city is limited."

Because you know, it had other cities to get to - theaters Boston and Chicago and Minneapolis and San Francisco and Buffalo everywhere else was waiting for their chance.

[MUSIC OUT]

But that’s something else than what we’re talking about this season, because Ben Hur and The Clansman and all the hundreds of other big commercial productions had started in New York? Increasingly they were staying longer and longer in New York  - running not just several weeks, but months, maybe a whole theatrical season! Well, the financial rewards were boggling, and the stakes began to be so high that the backers needed to know if these shows were good commercial propositions to begin with - because of course there were hundreds of shows that flopped and ‘got found out’ on the road. So New York producers, right about this time, began to consider - what if to be sure that we had a good thing to invest time and money in - the right script, the right stars, the right dances, the best songs, a story everyone could follow - we gave it a bit of a  . you know, not just a trial, but a tryout? So what was a tryout?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the great authority on English language etymology, ‘tryout’ was a word that migrated over to show business from the sports world  - meaning “A selective trial; also, an experimental trial, a test of performance, a trial run or period, spec. of a play, etc., in a provincial theatre, etc.”; Baseball players and rowers and cricketers might be given a ‘tryout’ on athletic teams, both in England and America. Eventually, says the OED, the first time tryout was used in a theatrical sense was 1923, when the New York Times referred to it as “an experimental hearing of a new act, usually far away from Broadway.” Now notice they don’t say a new play - they say a new act, which implies vaudeville, a topic we’re going to talk about in our NEXT episode.

But I’m afraid the fellas at the OED, god love them, are already behind the curve of Theater History. Because just by using Google ngrams, I can learn that in the year 1918 the theater historian Arthur Hornblow was using the term ‘tryout town’ in reference to the city of Chicago, to wit: “there is only a very small coterie of first-nighters in Chicago . . who are very suspicious of every new play, and are inclined to resent the fact that Chicago is used as a tryout town.” Hornblow doesn’t even put the phrase in quotation mark

So what is a tryout town? Well it was a bit of a disparaging term, really. It meant any city with a large theater, outside New York, where producers could see if their show was good enough and do a little shake-down cruise, as it were. Actually, big cities like Philadelphia and Chicago weren’t always the best choices - after all the locals considered themselves sophisticated theatergoers, didn’t like to be treated like test markets, they wanted to see the real quality thing. And anyway in big cities it was too easy for word to get quickly back to New York and showbiz gossip circles if things weren't going well. So what you were looking for was what was called in Vaudeville lingo a ‘dog town’ - a quiet small city where dogs might lie down peacefully in the streets and no one might disturb them. Places still close enough to New York, like Hartford or Stamford or New Haven in Connecticut, Newark or Trenton in New Jersey. Springfield, Massachusetts, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heck even Yonkers or Albany in New York. And then these Dog Towns could become Tryout Towns, where local theatergoers would view it as a treat to see a fresh new production, long before it got to a theater on or close to the Manhattan street called Broadway.

[MUSIC, UNDER]

October 19, 1904: George M. Cohan's new show, Little Johnny Jones, opened at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. It had previously played brief engagements in Hartford, New Haven, and Springfield, Massachusetts. After Philly it would take a brief stop in Harrisburg. But it was definitely on its way to New York, where it was already booked to open at the Liberty Theatre in early November.

It was Cohan's first "star" production - one in which he both created and starred in the show under his own name. He had literally grown up in his family vaudeville act along with his parents and sister, billed jointly as "The Four Cohans." (His 1901 show, The Governor's Son, which had featured The Four Cohans, had come to the Walnut in April of 1901 in a post-Broadway tour.) Early in 1904 it seemed there had been some sort of quarrel, because showbiz gossip said the family act was breaking up. But apparently the Cohans had patched things up again, and his parents and sister were all given small parts in Little Johnny Jones. But the star was definitely George.

The 1904 production of Little Johnny Jones is famous in theater history for being one of the first musicals with an actual plot stitching together its various songs and dance numbers. It included the now-famous Cohan songs "Give My Regards To Broadway" - which wasn’t really about Broadway theaters but about the Broadway nightlife and bars and nightclubs, and you might also know the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy." If you're familiar with it, it's probably because you've seen James Cagney dancing and singing in both of those numbers in the 1942 Hollywood biopic of Cohan. [MUSIC OUT]

As with many supposed game-changers in the development of the musical, few folks seemed to take much notice at the time. The Philly papers only gave it cursory attention - after all, there were plenty of other fun shows in Philadelphia theaters that day, including David Belasco's Sweet Kitty Bellairs at the Academy of Music, and Fritzi Scheff in the operetta The Two Roses at the Chestnut Street Opera House. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones got a quick mention in the Inquirer at a "delightful evening's entertainment" - but that was about it. 

Almost every musical show or revue that came through town got praised back in those days. Serious theater criticism was reserved for actual plays. Newspapers mostly just printed any publicists' copy that they were handed about musicals. And often savvy producers hired journalists to be their local ‘advance men,’ ensuring good coverage.

After two weeks at the Walnut, Cohan moved the show on to New York. There the show played only a few months, and then went out on tour once more. In fact, by April of 1905 Little Johnny Jones was back in Philadelphia, this time at the larger and more lucrative Chestnut Street Theatre. For Philadelphia, that was closer to Broad Street, if not Broadway.

[MUSIC ]

All right, so we’re still rolling back through that list of questions. And speaking of Philadelphia streets, and the theaters that were often named after those streets - what about the Arch Street Theatre, when Julian Marsh tells the cast of Pretty Lady that they’re going to the Arch Street Theatre - well I gotta say that wasn’t a thing. No big new musicals were rolling through the Arch Street Theatre in the 1920s and 30s, either before or after Broadway. By this time the dear old Arch, the longtime home theater of the Drews (and by inheritance, the Barrymores) was over 100 years old, and was a very old-fashioned Victorian style house, with iron pillars in its balconies blocking folks’ views and a pretty limited backstage area. And it was in a very unfashionable part of town. Nowhere near the glittering theaters of Broad Street, like the Forrest or the Shubert or the Lyric. The Arch was, in fact, now in the middle of the Tenderloin neighborhood, full of bars and bordellos and drug dens and theatrical flophouses. It was more often the home of Yiddish Theatre than English language drama, and when it wasn’t hosting those it was hosting burlesque and low vaudeville. And by 1936 it was abandoned by its owner and torn down to make room for a parking lot. So no, that reference in the movie is just tin-eared, in terms of actual Philadelphia theater - but whatever Holly screenwriter typed that line - he was operating off some bad information. 

I can imagine him calling out to his writing partner as they pound away on their typewriters in some bungalow: “Hey buddy, what’s the name of a theater in Philly?” “I dunno,” replies his partner, and then he remembers something he half-heard one time about Ethel Barrymore . . “Hey, what about the Arch Street Theatre!” “Okay,” says the first guy, and it went into the script. And then he remembers that old showbiz crack (again, as we’ll learn, really a longtime vaudeville gag) about Philadelphia being a politically corrupt and socially dull town, one that due to its restrictive Blue Laws, you can’t get a drink or even go to a movie or a baseball game on Sundays. 

Merkel [scornfully]: Philadelphia PA . . 

Rogers [snidely]: Yeah, and on Sundays - it’s PU. [Laughter from the company]

And then comes this next remark, from the leading lady of the company, pleading with her director. She doesn’t WANT to go to a strange place like dirty old corrupt Philadelphia PU, she wants to go someplace easy and fun and breezy and less threatening to her career prospects . . 

Bebe Daniels [as Dorothy Brock]: Julian, you mean Atlantic City, don’t you? 

Because, it turns out, ladies and gentlemen - and believe you me, I only just found this out myself. To show folks, the most well-known and familiar dog town in the country in the early twentieth century - in fact the premier “Tryout Town’ in America, was not Philadelphia, but instead it was the seaside resort where so many Philadelphians spent their summer months back in those days, and even now: Atlantic City, New Jersey.

[MUSIC, UNDER]

I have here in my hand an amazing doctoral dissertation “Atlantic City as a Tryout Town,” submitted in 1973 by the scholar Constance Barrie Martin to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Professor Martin goto her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University in 1960, and she had grown up, as it turns out, in Atlantic City. So she was the perfect person for this task. 

Her paper begins: 

“From 1900 to 1935 approximately 1,100 plays tried out on Atlantic City stages before their scheduled opening in New York City. Some of these productions never reached New York; others played hundreds of performances both in New York and on tour in all parts of the country. During these years the resort became the foremost tryout town in the East and the response of Atlantic City audiences to a show was regarded as indicative of how New York audiences would receive it. On the strength of the reaction in Atlantic City, plays were altered, actors replaced, or whole productions shelved. . . ”

From her exhaustive study of newspapers and journals of bygone days, reported Martin:“It was difficult to determine when tryout first appeared in Atlantic City, but the 1900-01 season seemed to mark the beginning. Their number reached a peak in the 1909-10 season, a second, higher peak in the 1919-20 season, and then declined and came to an end in the 1934-35 season . . .” 

[MUSIC OUT]

During that period Atlantic City had distinct advantages: 1) it was within a day’s travel of New York, and 2) It had to be easily reached by some form of transportation - which meant trucks or even better, trains.  in fact some of the fastest locomotives in the world operated between New York and Atlantic City in that period. So: check and check. 3) It needed to have a theater-going population large enough to fill the house for several performances and preferably to give an educated and cosmopolitan reaction. Well the population of Atlantic City was only about 27,000 people year round, but in the summer months it swelled to twice that, as its huge hotels and resorts filled with city people - many of them from Philadelphia, whose rail connections to Atlantic City were much shorter and quicker. Indeed for years, folks had been accustomed to taking day trips by boat to Atlantic City during the summer months, or if you were a person of means, you might stay a month - maybe two.  And 4) says Dr Martin you needed theater facilities large enough to sufficiently large and equipped to serve the needs of a complex production.

And by 1898 Atlantic City had its own new Academy of Music, where the production Her Majesty, the Girl Queen of Nordenmark had a tryout run in May of 1900. Now this show did not receive good notices when it got to New York, but clearly the producers liked the experience they’d had there. In January of 1901, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, starring a young Ethel Barrymore came there -after first playing the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. So we can see that sometimes Philly did get the first crack at it. But on the whole Atlantic City began to attract more and more shows, and more and more theaters were built there to accommodate them, sometimes right on the piers! You could hear the waves crashing beneath you as the shows went on. A new theater, the Savoy, that seated 1200 people, quickly became the premier house however. Later the Apollo theater joined it. Soon the Philadelphia Syndicate moved in and Samuel F. Nixon was sniffing around to build or acquire venues there. Soon the Syndicate’s great rivals, the Shuberts, were there as well, and they snapped up the Savoy from under Nixon’s nose. By 1910 things were really buzzing, writes Martin, and people began to come to Atlantic City just to catch the tryout shows, it became a thing: “ The opportunity to see new productions plus the showmen and stars who put them on attracted not only the tourists but the theater people as well. Thus the city flourished also as a theatrical resort because it was close to the theatrical centers of New York and Philadelphia, provided many types of entertainment, and afforded show folk the chance of meeting friends.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

And after all we’ve got to bring this story back to Philadelphia. How did shows like the fictional Pretty Lady in 42nd Street start tryout there, instead of Atlantic City? (The chronology works out pretty well, too - remember the movie was made in 1933, just before the end of the era when plays would try out downashore instead of in a Broad Street theater.) Well that’s exactly what we plan to talk about in our episodes this season. We will be exploring and explaining the main story of Philadelphia Theater from the years 1918 to 1982, when - at least in terms of show business - it was widely understood that Philadelphia was a tryout town - one of the main Tryout Towns in the country, maybe THE main Tryout Town. You remember that song?

[MUSIC: UNDER]

Everyone’s been singing that song to me ever since I announced this season. And of course Kiss Me Kate had its  pre-Broadway in December of 1948, in the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia.  But before we talk about that, we need to talk about the other major form of live showbiz in the early 20th Century, one that at times seemed destined to overwhelm both the legitimate theater and grand opera in its heyday: Vaudeville. We will pick up the story there, next time. It’s going to be an exciting season of episodes -  Guys and Dolls, Death of a Salesman, Diary of Anne Frank, Strike Up the Band - but there are lots and lots more shows that tried out in Philly, but you certainly haven’t, because they flopped in Philly, but they make great stories, too - possibly even better than the successes.

 . . .So anyway, we’ll be back again here soon. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our original theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci. The sound editing and engineering, this time around anyway, is by My Humble Self. Thank you for listening, thank you for your support, and thank you for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]

Copyright 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved