THE ARCH STREET
THEATER |
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In the summer of 1898, Morris Finkel decided to bring
first-class Yiddish theatre to Philadelphia and he rented the
old Arch Street Theater,[i]
613 Arch Street. Morris Finkel, a regisseur, (i.e., a
Yiddish theater entrepreneur), determined to bring New York
excitement to the sleepy Yiddish stage of Philadelphia.
During the fall of 1898, the Arch Street Theater sparkled with
Yiddish shund, or popular theater, and drama.
The Arch Street Theater was not the first Yiddish theater in
Philadelphia but it would be one of the largest. Another
theater, the Oriental, located at Dramatic Hall, 5th
& Gaskill streets, had been popular when the immigrants first
arrived. In the early 1890s, Tatem's stables, a comparatively
new brick building on the east side of 8th Street
below Lombard Street, was purchased by a "company of Hebrews"
and plans were made to transform the building into a Yiddish
theater. Nothing came of this idea and for a number of years
there was no established Yiddish theater in Philadelphia.
During the Panic of 1892, the immigrants had little money for
frivolities, although they did attend infrequent traveling
productions given in halls and theaters rented for individual
performances.[ii] |
The Arch Street Theater, Philadelphia
From a photo-engraving in
"The Delineator", September, 1923.
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By the fall
of 1898, economic conditions in the country, and in the Jewish
quarter, improved; for three or four months, the Arch Street Theater
proved wildly popular with the immigrants, but this popularity did
not necessarily excite young offspring. The younger generation grew
to maturity in their adopted country and for them, English was their
mother tongue. They "not only did not wish to remember [Jargon, or
Yiddish], but pretend they do not know."[iii]
Opening the Arch Street Theater, however, may not have
been Finkel's chief reason for moving to Philadelphia. Finkel, who
was then well into his forties, divorced and living in New York,
persuaded the teenage actress, Emma Thomashevsky, the youngest
sister of Boris, to marry and escape to Philadelphia, a place
familiar to her as she played here on the Yiddish stage as a young
girl. Finkel did this behind the backs of the loving and close
Thomashevsky family.[iv]
In Philadelphia, Finkel immediately scheduled High Holy Day services
at the Arch Street Theater, presumably to acquaint the immigrants
with the location of the building which was somewhat north of where
most of the immigrants lived. Advertisements in the New York
Yiddish press soon announced that Sigmund Mogulesko (Mogulescu), the
great Yiddish comic actor, would perform for an entire week at the
Arch Street Theater. No Jewish actor was more loved in the
immigrant community than Mogulesko.
Finkel
declared that Mogulesko would perform in Philadelphia "for the
entire coming season," a claim many must have seriously doubted,
given the semi-provincial nature of the Yiddish stage in
Philadelphia. Among other pieces, Mogulesko was to star in
Coquettish Ladies, a show Mogulesko himself had brought to
Philadelphia a decade earlier. The following week, Finkel had even
better news for the yidn. He announced that the great
actress, Keni Liptzin would appear for an entire week and on Friday
evening, Saturday afternoon and evening, October 3rd and
4th, 1898, she would perform Mirele Efros, the
Yiddish King Lear, perhaps the best loved play of Jacob Gordin. However,
soon Finkel tired of the city, or exhausted his supply of actors who
wanted to leave New York, and so the Arch Street theatre reverted to
vaudeville again and would not again see Yiddish theatre on this
grand scale until Mike Thomashevskky took the Arch Street Theatre
over in 1909 and for the next 27 years ran it as a Yiddish theatre
and a vaudeville theatre until it was sold in 1936."
[i]
For personal recollections of one of the stars of that old
theater, see Autobiographical Sketch of Mrs. John Drew,
with biographical notes by Douglas Taylor (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1899), and Evening Bulletin, July 10 and
October 21, 1936. Mrs. Drew was the grandmother of the three
Barrymores, Ethel, Lionel and John. The Arch Street Theater was
reconstructed in 1863. With its red plush seats, its white and
gold trimmings, its crystal chandeliers and general appearance
of newness, it was considered "the last word in the provision of
a modern playhouse."
[ii]
Public Ledger, Monday, June 13, 1892, at the Academy of
Music. In the summer, the Academy of Music and other
center-city theaters were used for Yiddish productions. The
legitimate theater ended its season when the summer heat arrived
which made these buildings available to the immigrants.
[iii]
The Immigrant Jew in America, Edited by Edmund J. James
(New York: B.F. Buck & Co., 1907), p. 235. Within the next
several years, two additional theaters catered to the older east
European Jews, the uptown National Theater, 10th &
Callowhill streets, which produced plays in English and Yiddish,
and the Standard, 12th & South streets, which for a
few years had an English-speaking stock company which produced
immigrant-theater fare. See, The Immigrant Jew in America,
pp. 235-237.
[iv]
The marriage ended in tragedy. On June 7, 1904, Finkel, in a
jealous rage, shot Emma and killed himself, The World,
June 9, 1904. At the time of the shooting, Emma was twenty
seven years old and mother of their three children. She was
permanently crippled. For years after, Emma enjoyed the Yiddish
theater crowd in Atlantic City, NJ, at the Majestic Hotel, 169
S. Virginia Avenue, owned by Pelicoff and Frankel. Yiddish
actors, especially the Thomashevskys, danced and laughed at the
hotel and on Sunday evenings they performed at local theatres.
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