68. The Passing Shows of the 1920s

© Podcast text copyright - Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

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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 theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci. Having finally set the stage - by telling you - in our past episodes - about vaudeville and the advent of movies and the changes to Walnut and the growing dominance of the Shubert family in American commercial theater generally, and in Philadelphia theatrical real estate specifically - we are finally ready to concentrate on the plays themselves.  In this episode we’re going to be talking about touring Broadway shows that came through Philadelphia during the decade of the 1920s - either after they had already played New York, or in what was slowly becoming an increasing phenomenon, in their pre-Broadway tryouts. Sometimes it was the actual world premieres. Come along with us as we continue our Season Three, and tell the story of “Philadelphia, The Tryout Town.”

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And there was a lot of exciting new theater, all over America - although theater historians nowadays often understandably celebrate the innovations of the Little Theatre and Harlem Renaissance movements during the 1920s, there was simply so much going on in mainstream commercial theater. Despite the supposed growing competition of movies and vaudeville and radio back then, this decade was the absolute peak - both in terms of numbers plays, musicals, revues and operettas produced, and also in terms of theaters being built.

Some amazing commercial shows came through Philadelphias in the early 20s, which we’ll touch on briefly. First there, the original 1922 Provincetown Playhouse production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, starring Louis Wolheim as Yank, which had played Philadelphia's Lyric Theatre on North Broad Street in August. Then in that fall came a world premiere tryout production of the play Rain, the adaptation of the British writer Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson” - it was set in the steamy atmosphere of Pago Pago on the South Pacific Island of Samoa. The actress Jeanne Eagels starred in the role of an uninhibited American woman confronting a fire-and-brimstone Amer preacher, played by veteran actor Robert Kelly. Though the play still needed some tightening and some tuning, agreed the local critics, it was fantastic drama and real bravura acting. As one reviewer wrote:

“The acting opportunities are superb, and they have been taken advantage of by Miss Eagels and Mr. Kelly. The former’s Miss Thompson is the most extraordinary study of a street woman since Pauline Lord in Anna Christie. Her two best scenes were the denunciation, in which the low words poured out like lava, and the moment of silent cunning, in which she mutely laid her trap for the parson’s soul, one felt like shouting HURRAH for such unmatched art. It was magnificent.”

I mention this production of Rain just because it bears saying up front that the baselevel of American actors' technique was already well established, even before reforms and innovations that subsequently have gathered a lot of historians attention. The next year, 1923, was of course the very year that Jasper Deeter founded the Hedgerow Theatre out in suburban Rose Valley, a topic we’ve given a great deal of coverage to in past episodes of this show. And it was also the year that those acknowledged world innovators in modern theater techniques, the Russians, came to town.

April 22, 1923: The company of the Moscow Art Theatre, led by the director Constantin Stanislavsky, arrived in Philadelphia, after a long and triumphant stop in New York, where they wowed everyone. The MAT also wanted to see American stars, of course - there are great photos of the whole troupe standing with Philadelphia’s own John Barrymore after they had gone to a performance of his Hamlet. What the Russians troupe had of course was not star power but true ensemble acting that came from deep experience and familiarity with their repertoire, their roles and their fellow actors. It’s a famous event in theater history, and I absolutely recommend to you the astoundingly wonderful recent book entitled The Method: How America Learned to Act by Isaac Butler. But what is less well known and something which - perhaps understandably - Butler does not cover in his book at all, is that after they played New York they came to Philadelphia. A photo of the MAT company, with the tall and elegant Stanislavsky at their head, standing together in the old Broad Street Station next to City Hall, was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. With him were the company's leading actors, including Vasily Katchaloff, Ivan Moskvin, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Olga Knipper-Chekhov - the widow of playwright Anton Chekhov.

Producer Morris Gest, who was also in the photo, had brought the company to America, booked them into the Lyric Theatre at the corner of Broad and Cherry Streets north of City Hall. Starting on Monday the 23rd, they were to perform some of the most famous plays in their repertoire, including Chekhov's Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, and Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich by Alexi Tolstoy.

Philadelphia theatergoers flocked to see the famous company perform, even though their plays were done entirely in Russian. However I must note that the journalist the Inquirer sent to see the shows was unimpressed. About Three Sisters he wrote: "The play is drab. Drab, hopeless and stunted are the characters, none of whom even with their occasional yearnings for better things and brighter future seem to really extend much effort to fight the inexorable fate . . Comedy relief that even a presentation of the Old Homestead would exclude was in evidence."

Despite such journalistic carping, the tour was a financial and artistic success. The plays of Anton Chekhov from thereafter became part of the standard repertoire of serious American theater. Maria Ouspenskaya and other former MAT actors such as Richard Boleslawsky and Michael Chekhov (the playwright's nephew) came to America, began teaching Stanislavsky's 'method', and helped to transform the very nature of modern American acting.

To give an impression of what else was playing in the Philadelphia area, and how transformative the visit of the Russian company would eventually have on American theater, here’s what else was playing in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1923 as the MAT made their visit:

In the adjoining Adelphi Theatre was the operetta Blossom Time, incorporating the music of composer Franz Schubert. The personal absolute favorite show ever of the otherwise rough and curmudgeonly J.J. Shubert, who during its New York run would frequently sneak into the back and cry and cry at the sad ending. The show was evidently an even bigger hit with Philly audiences than the MAT, because it had been running for 28 solid weeks - it had been playing at the Lyric, but the show moved over to the Adelphi to accommodate the MAT.

That same week, Eddie Cantor, in his usual full blackface persona, was coming to the Chestnut Street Opera House in the show Make it Snappy. At the Shubert Theatre was the revue Greenwich Village Follies. (It really had nothing to do with Greenwich Village - the Shubert Brothers had come across this downtown topical revue, liked it, bought it out, then completely changed it and made it like all their other various money making topical revues, like The Passing Show).

The Forrest Theatre (again, this was the first one, on Broad St.) was hosting a demonstration/lecture called Hunting Big Game in Africa with Gun and Camera, which was to be followed the next week by the touring company of the long-running all-Black Broadway show Shuffle Along by Flornoy and Miller.

The Walnut Street Theatre - again, still independently owned and operated by Joseph Beury -  was hosting a new comedy called “Kempy” (“A Thousand and One Laughs!”), but he was about to make room for the Marx Brothers in I’ll Say She Is, which we talked about in Episode 50. And at Fay’s Theatre in West Philadelphia was a vaudeville troupe that was showing “Moscowyarr”, described as “a company of fifteen typical scenes of old and new Russia, with special scenery and lighting effects.”

March 24, 1924: Philadelphia’s Earle Theatre (EARLE), billed as the "Last Word in Playhouse Construction," had its grand opening night. Designed by the firm of Hoffman-Henon, the Earle was  one of those new types of theaters - a combined movie and vaudeville house on the southeast corner of 11th and Market. It had 2768 seats, a stage 62 feet wide and 15 dressing rooms for performers. A seven-story tower above it provided offices for Philadelphia’s Stanley Corporation, who had constructed it. And this was only the first of four similar houses the company would erect that same year in other American cities. The Earle was to feature stage shows, musical acts, and major motion pictures. A huge movie screen would be lowered across the proscenium to show films, and then raised again to feature acts from the Keith Vaudeville Circuit.

Special trains had been chartered by the owner Jules Mastbaum, each of them packed with other entertainment executives, political dignitaries and entertainment celebrities, who were arriving all day long for this occasion. The composer Victor Herbert was on hand to listen to a selection of his own famous melodies which was being played that night by a 24-piece orchestra in the pit. Music could also be heard from the huge two-section Kimball organ, its pipes rising on either side of the beautiful auditorium. 

For the Philadelphia public, promised an ad: “There will be much to see. The marble vestibules are a poet’s dream – magnificent, colorful, a thing of beauty. In the lobby are murals by George Harding; tapestries from the looms of inspired artists. Luxury combined with comfort is manifest. Great roomy armchairs are provided for the visitor and in convenient places are suites devoted to men and to women. Founts that provide ice water through golden taps abound.”

The copywriter had not finished with his paean to the new edifice: “And then the auditorium! What exquisite taste, what beauty! Unobstructed view of stage and screen from every seat. . . .Highest quality shows at the lowest possible prices commencing this evening. Continuous performance daily from eleven in the morning until eleven at night.”

December 24th, 1924: George White’s Scandals was at the Forrest. Scandals had been running at the Apollo Theatre in New York (the one in Times Square - not the Apollo in Harlem) since June, and Scandals was now off on a tour. Philadelphia was the first stop, where the show planned to stay for two weeks during the lucrative holiday season.

It had two acts of twenty-fives scenes and musical numbers - ending with a huge finale danced to “The Charleston.”

George White’s Scandals was one of those very popular Broadway revues of the day - which usually featured the name of its producer linked with a noun, like The Ziegfeld Follies or Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Essentially they were all high-class burlesque shows, with great music, good dancing, inventive comedy - and lots and lots of chorines in revealing costumes.

But how would this play in Philadelphia, you ask, which famously had instituted an official Board of Censors to stop smut on local stages? One comic sketch in the show was entitled “The Censors and Pogotown” - which was enacted entirely by comedians bouncing on pogo sticks - it was ready to poke fun at the Quaker City blue laws.

This was the sixth version of Scandals to be produced by George White (called “The Parisian Version”, and as usual the choreography of the show was by the choreography of the show was done by Ned Wayburn, the great master of tap dancing choruses.. But this version of the revue was especially notable because it featured songs by the composer George Gershwin (including “Somebody Loves Me”) and designs by the great Art Deco designer Erte.

In the second act, a number called “Lovers of Art” featured special lighting by the firm of Samaloff of London that made all the women of the chorus, dressed in bathing attire, appear to be nude statues. (The program said: “The management wishes to acknowledge the kind assistance of Mr. Julian Wylie of the London Hippodrome in the staging of this number.”)

In a photograph that I have in my collection of the exterior of the Forrest Theater from this period, we can see people and cars flocking to the lobby entrance on South Broad Street near Sansom, and the illuminated sign advertising the show: GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS!

The review in the Inquirer said: “This new edition of Scandals far outshines those of other years, and with a little alteration will take place as among the most enjoyable of shows.”

What sort of alteration? Well, the Inquirer critic was clearly not a Lover of Art. “Neither in the beauty of the production, in the artistic side, nor by any other means, is there justification for the nakedness of several of the scenes. Art may demand the nude, or semi-nude, but there is really no place in any revue for as much of it as is displayed in two or three of Mr. White’s numbers.”

“It should be thoroughly gone over and the members better clothed, and then would be left a really attractive show.”

And I should add at this point: Indeed the decline of the old fashioned burlesque theaters are often linked to the rise of these expensive extravaganzas like The Follies and Scandals - smaller local operations like the Trocadero in Philadelphia and burlesque circuits (or ‘wheels’) couldn’t compete with the production values of these Broadway behemoths and their star power - so instead they started offering racier and racier shows, with strip-tease dancers and real, real full nudity.

Anyway, going back to the Tryout Town: Philadelphians could see another example of this type of show - the next year, October 25, 1925, when the new edition of the annual Shubert Brothers' review Artists and Models was packing them in at the Chestnut Street Opera House.

The show was well-known for its "tableaux vivants" of semi-nude females posing in "artistic" manners. The Philadelphia Board of Theatrical Control didn't like it, but the rule was, as long as the girls don't move, even if they’re naked, it's not Smut.

And there was an extra inducement for sports fans to come to the theater that week! Because back then, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, the University of Pennsylvania - the Fighting Quakers! - was a major power in college football. In the Philly papers it was announced:

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The new edition of Artists and Models, Messrs. Shubert's famous girl-and-music annual, has scored a big hit with the local patrons of art, as well the collegiate following and the butter and egg contingent, and as a result this house has had to dust off the "Standing Room Only" sign.

This gay and sparkling revue of comics, models, tunes and tinsel enters upon its second week tomorrow night. In honor of Pennsylvania and Illinois next Saturday will be "Football Night."

The chorus girls are rehearsing the yells and songs of each university for this occasion.

Outstanding features of "Artists and Models" are "The Living Palette," the "Promenade Walk," the "French Fan," the "Midnight Color Ball," and the golf scene.

An alluring collection of fifty beautiful artists' models appear in the posing tableaux and musical numbers. The cast of principals is quite efficient.

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Despite all this artistic encouragement, on October 31, 1925, the University of Pennsylvania lost their game to Red Grange and the University of Illinois. The score was 22-2. Red Grange scored three touchdowns, including two 60 yard runs. (Penn, for its part, only scored once, on a safety after blocking a punt.)

October 3, 1927: The brand-new Erlanger Theatre on the corner of 21st and Market Street opened for the first time. This was the big theater that Abe Erlanger, pretty much the last man standing of the Old Theatrical Syndicate, built in Philadelphia after his old joint venture with the Shuberts, the Forrest Theatre on Broad, was torn down, and the Shuberts went off to build the NEW Forrest on Walnut - all of which we detailed in our last episode.

Constructed by, and named after, Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, the 1800-seat theater boasted all modern conveniences. It was meant to be the first of several new theaters that would turn the western stretch of Market Street into a new "Great White Way", trumpeted the Philadelphia Inquirer. The total cost of the theater’s construction was 2.5 million dollars.

To inaugurate the new house, Abe Erlanger sent the show Criss Cross - a hit musical that he had produced in the previous New York season, starring the father-and-daughter team of Fred and Dorothy Stone. The music was by Jerome Kern, and lyrics were by Otto Harbach and Anne Caldwell.

Like many musicals of the era, Criss Cross was a thinly-plotted show, and its story featured the exploits of a famous aviator who saves a young lady from a plotting Arab sheik. It included such songs as "Hydrophobia Blues", "In Araby with You", "I Love My Little Susie", and "Dance of the Camel Boys" (none of these, admittedly, Kern classics). The chorus costumes were vaguely North African, wth fezzes and zouave jackets, to match the Algerian locale.

But the main star of the evening was the amazing new Erlanger Theatre itself, which had up-to-date technical equipment backstage, and spacious and luxurious areas for the audience in front. It even boasted that most sought-after new technology - air-conditioning. Most notable (and progressive) was the Spanish Lounge, a huge lobby area downstairs which was intended as a mixed smoking area for both ladies and men. 

But between all these theaters the Walnut, the Chestnut St. Opera House, the Lyric, the Adelphi, the Garrick,  there were now lots of Broadway style houses in Philly which was there to host tryout show, and still, right next door to the grand old lady of all Philadelphia theaters, the Academy of Music, was the 1700-seat Sam S. Shubert Theatre - which we talked about last time. now hosting such tryout shows as George Gershwin’s Strike up the Band .

Strike Up The Band! Was a political satire, with original book by George S. Kaufman centered on Horace J. Fletcher, an American cheese tycoon who tries to maintain his monopoly on the market by convincing the USA to declare war on Switzerland.

This is NOT yet another tale of success, however. Despite such classic Gershwin numbers as "I've Got a Crush on You," "Soon," "The Man I Love," and of course the title song "Strike Up The Band," the show flopped, and never made it out of Philadelphia after this try-out run at the Shubert Theatre in September of 1927. Even after it was revived on Broadway in 1930 (with the disputed product changed from cheese to the more appetizing chocolate by writer Maury Ryskind), the show never caught on with the public. Most folks blamed the genre. "Satire is what closes on Saturday night," Kaufman famously declared. The book to the show was tossed in the trash, and except for its great songs, for many years it was mostly lost to history. 

What about non-musical plays in Philadelphia? Well, again and again what you mostly see being offered during the 1920s are melodramas - shows offering lots of sensation, lots of ‘passion’ and lots of perils. “Ripped from today's headlines,” the promotions for these shows often read - so inevitably, one of them was literally about how those headlines got written.

February 6, 1928: Maurine Watkins' play Chicago arrived at the Walnut Street Theatre for a two-week run. The original star of the previous season's Broadway hit, Francine Larrimore, played the role of the unrepentant murderess Roxie Hart. The director was George Abbott.

The ads for this show included lots of pull quotes from various Philadelphia newspapers. "Couldn't be improved upon," wrote the Public Ledger. "Guaranteed to thrill," proclaimed the Record. "You recover from the thrill," assured the Philadelphia News, "then laugh and be thankful you're alive."

However the review from the Philadelphia Inquirer was not in ad, because their critic had been much more skeptical: "A large audience greeted with every sign of approval the coarse and noisy play in which Francine Larrimore took the leading part at the Walnut last evening. By calling it simply 'Chicago' Miss Watkins apparently wishes us to think that is characteristic of that city. A woman of lower class, who lapses into profanity on the slightest provocation, shoots her lover for some reason that is not clearly explained; the scene is noisy as it is brief. She has a husband who tries to take the crime on himself, but without success. Then we see this Roxie Hart, first in the county jail, next in the courtroom on trial for her life. She is acquitted by a jury after a broad burlesque of the tactics employed by criminal lawyers in such cases. . . The satire on reporters, attorneys and other figures of this drab 'comedy' is laid on with a heavy hand. It moves laughter at times, but it does not really amuse." [SFX: Gunshot] He had it coming.

April 2, 1928: The Squall, a "passionate drama of the sexes," began churning the waters at the Walnut Street Theatre.

Attributed to the author "Jean Bart", the script was apparently written by a first-time female author, Mrs. E. Sarlabous, and had originally been staged in 1926 at a summer theater in Skowhegan, Maine. There it had been such a sensation that it was brought immediately to Broadway by the producers Morris Green and A.L. Jones, as a star vehicle for the leading actress Blanche Yurka. Even in a very crowded New York theatrical season it had successfully run for a solid year.

Now The Squall was on a post-Broadway tour, with Yurka still headlining the cast. As it came to Philadelphia in the spring of 1928, it was being marketed as being full of "Spanish passion" and plenty of sex. It told "the story of Nubi, a vixenish gypsy beauty who seeks refuge from a tornado in the peaceful house of Mendez, [and] sets about to seduce all the males, and is successful until driven from the house." Publicity images showed the gypsy girl being amorously embraced by a man, leaning backwards, while her clothes were barely managing to stay in place. Meanwhile, the storms of passion inside the house are matched by the actual storms outside it.

But it was the special effects of this theatrical storm, rather than the twisting clenches of the supposed Latin lovers that particularly impressed one Philadelphia reviewer who saw the show at the Walnut (and here again I quote at length, forgive me):

"Here we find temporary Spaniards, wotting not of the cyclonic ruckus about to be loosed on them by the electrician and the property man, and all aglee and agog and askew at the prospect of seen the Gypsy girls slant their sinuous bodies at the circus that night. Of course, they never get to the circus because a gentleman standing offstage releases both barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the pseudo-Spaniards are so flabbergasted that they scurry to close the shutters . .  The squall whose fury and racket shakes the building and even jars slightly the structures farther up the street.  . . . [designer Langdon] McCormick produced a stage storm that would seem realistic even to a Florida realtor. He brought three kinds of lightning, muted thunder, thunder that rips up to a crescendo like the hammer of Thor, and skittish fickle thunder of the type that makes your sister hide in the clothes closet. Not content with this he invented the atmospheric exercises with slow clouds and fast clouds . . and whipped these on to the stage by canvas wind from an electric fan, the last mounted on a strategic pedestal and operated by Jack Walz, [the Walnut's] property man of twenty years' standing." 

But it wasn’t all melodrama and bosom-heaving melodrama. One of the Little theater groups we talked about in Episode 66, had grown to become a big producing organization itself, and it prided itself on mounting major dramas by the new group of great playwrights, both from American and around the world: George Bernard Shaw, Ferencz Molnar, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson - and particularly, since the decline of the Provincetown Players their favorite Eugene O’Neill. 

Eugene O'Neill would eventually have eight plays produced with the Guild, including Marco Millions, which ran in New York from January through March of 1928, starring Alfred Lunt as Marco Polo. The Guild sent the play on tour in the fall, with Earle Larrimore in the role of Marco and Margalo Gilmore as Princess Kukachin. On December 3, 1928: The Theatre Guild brought Marco Millions to the Garrick Theatre. 

It was directed by Rouben Mamoulian, and lushly designed by Lee Simonson.Also notable members of the cast were some of the smaller roles - future movie star Claude Rains as Chuy-yin, future acting teacher Sanford Meisner as Ghuzan, and Morris Carnovsky as Kublai Khan. (Both Carnovsky and Rains won high praise from Philadelphia reviewers. Meisner and the rest of the supporting cast, however, were called merely 'creditable'. Larrimore's interpretation of Polo was called 'uneven', and Miss Gilmore's beauty onstage was rather undercut by her 'raucous emoting'.)

In the play the Venetian merchant travels to meet the Mongol Emperor of 13th Century China, but in O'Neill's version of the story he is not a noble adventurer, but instead a crass salesman - a medieval version of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, surrounded by the beauty and sophistication of the Yuan Dynasty, he can only see gain and potential profit.

Wrote the Inquirer's reviewer: "Weaving in and out this wonderful symposium of color is the story of the modern idea of the high-powered salesman, a braggart character, uncouth, material-minded, selfish, brusque, forceful, rude and crude.  . . Mr. O'Neill subtly places him in strong contrast to the quiet, gentle and intellectual Kublai, the great Khan of Cathay.  . . . In no place is this marked difference better emphasized than in the insensibility he shows toward the love of the Khan's gentle granddaughter who by this strange attraction of antithesis eats out her heart in great affection for him, while he, materially-minded, wines and dines gluttonously. It is a gripping little love tale." Although there were long passages of O'Neill's play that tended to drag, the reviewer admitted, the visual spectacle of the production was amazing, and that Mamoulian's staging and Simonson's visual effects "defy description."

And that’s the end of our show for today. Before we leave the 1920s, I’ve got a treat to share with you all. Up next on our schedule we’ll have a special episode, a reading of a first-hand account, written by the one of the actors in the company, of a touring show entitled Trelawny of the Welles, starring Mr. John Drew, that son of Philadelphia, and uncle to all the Barrymores (Ethel, John, and Lionel), who in the nineteen teens and twenties was still the grand old man of Broadway. It was his final tour - and of course the production made a final nostalgic and triumphant stop in Philadelphia. Look for it on this podcast feed in two weeks time, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

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. 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. Or, another way to thank us, is to leave some stars and/or a review about the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - or you can do that right on our website w w w dot, AITHpodcast.com that helps us out so much.

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

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(© Podcast text copyright - Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.)