The Philadelphia Drama Guild

The sudden success of the Drama Guild - a former amateur theater group transformed into a professional local powerhouse - finally fulfills the promise of giving Philadelphia a flagship nonprofit theater company.

For a brief blog post with images from the episode, go HERE.

Transcript

© Peter Schmitz 2025. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME]

Hello and welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories about the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz, and our original theme music - which you just heard is by Christopher Mark Colucci. (Additional music is by Epidemic Sound.) Join us, as we continue our Season Four: “The Rise of Modern Philadelphia Theater.” Today we will begin the story of one of the biggest professional non-profit theaters in the Philly area throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90: The Philadelphia Drama Guild.

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Ever since the beginning of the Little Theater Movement in the early 20th century, Philadelphia and its environs, like most American urban areas, was full of amateur theater groups and community drama organizations. Many of these groups were run and stocked by people who had studied theater in local colleges and universities, but now they were doing something else, professionally speaking. But they just couldn't leave behind the joy, satisfaction and sense of community that doing theater bright them. In the 1930s, many of them continued to study acting with Jasper Deeter, in the classes he offered at the Hedgerow Theater, others would joining the classes offered by Mae Desmond in West Philadelphia, or at Miss Shalett’s School of Expression and Dramatic Art at the former Musical Arts Club on Ranstead Street in Center City, or the Theatre League on Chancellor Street to the west of Rittenhouse Square, or with the Germantown Theatre Club in Northwest Philadelphia, or with the Community Players, who had a home in South Philadelphia. And there were literally dozens of others.

Many of these community theater groups created their own performance spaces in church basements, social club halls, hotel ballrooms, converted movie theaters - even old barns and stables. But the real gem for little theater groups in Philly remained the Plays & Players Theatre - which we’ve talked about many times, built in 1913 on 1714 Delancey Street. - which remained a consistent rental venue for all these groups, and often Plays & Players had a resident community company of its own. Also actively utilized by community theaters was the large ballroom/theater space at the YMHA/YWHA on South Broad and Pine, which naturally was frequented by Jewish-oriented community theater groups, as the double acronym stood for “Young Men’s Hebrew Association or Young Women’s Hebrew Association” - the Jewish community counterpart to all the ubiquitous YMCAs throughout the area.

In the post-war years of the 40’s and 50’s some of these amateur theater groups and schools had folded, true, others hung on and still others were being formed. We’ve mentioned  in previous episodes - and someday soon we promise to come back to it - the Society Hill Playhouse run by Jay and Deen Kogan, for example. 

But in the summer of 1956 a community group "The Shakespeare-Classic Theater" began doing shows outdoors in the Germantown neighborhood, before later finding a winter home indoors at the YMHA/YWHA on Broad Street. Changing its name to The Drama Guild, it moved to the Plays & Players, and over the years it had done mostly classic plays: Brecht, Shaw, O'Casey, and Shakespeare - as well as modern playwrights like Jules Feiffer. It had built up a loyal legion of subscribers and supporters, and was especially known for its educational mission and performances for local school groups.

Now, the driving force behind the growth and success of the Drama Guild was - a dentist! One Sidney Bloom, DDS, to be precise. Originally Dr. Bloom had caught the acting bug himself and had appeared in shows with the Guild, but then he realized, as he said, "there were a thousand actors better than me." He became the producer of the organization instead, keeping it alive through the inevitable vicissitudes that had sunk many of those other similar groups, mostly by maintaining a very tight hand on the group’s finances.

But Dr. Bloom also kept up his successful dentistry practice. In fact he had a very nice list of well-connected patients, it turned out. Among them was not only the Governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, but also Richard Bennett, who was executive director of the very wealthy Haas Community Foundation, which had recently underwritten the restoration of the Walnut Street Theatre. There had always been some talk that the Theater of the Living Arts might take over the Walnut Street space, but as we have related in previous episodes the TLA’s edgy artistic reputation and its financial instability doomed that prospect, in the end. By 1970, just as the Walnut project neared completion, the TLA was defunct. 

So what to do?, thought the Haas Foundation. Now Philadelphia, unlike every other major metropolitan area in the country, had no major non-profit repertory company. Still, the Haas Foundation desperately wanted some resident professional company for the Walnut Theatre space. Sidney Bloom raised his hand, Richard Bennett gave him $63,000 in seed money to turn the Drama Guild into a professional theater company that would engage Actors Equity union actors. But how could a local dentist succeed where the equally well-connected Andre Gregory himself had failed?

The answer was - star power. It turned out that Sidney Bloom's neighbor at his vacation home over on the Jersey Shore was the veteran New York actor John Randolph. In a period when Broad was in a bit of a decline, John Randolph knew that there were loads of Broadway quality actors who would love to do classic parts in a nearby city, as long as it was understood that they still had plenty of flexibility to drop out or reschedule if they got a big TV gig or a big movie part at the last minute. The popular Randolph passed the word around his wide New York circle, and soon there were a lot of big name actors who were willing to come to Philly - and there were a lot of eager Philadelphians who wanted to come see shows - and this was the big draw - that they KNEW they would like the shows beforehand!

So, Sidney Bloom was soon able to announce to his delighted subscribers that in the Guild's first fully professional season were such big names as Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy in Sheridans’ play The Rivals, Diana Sands and John Randolph in the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday, and Julie Harris in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Phones at the Drama Guild’s offices were ringing off the hook and it had 16,000 subscribers within a few weeks of announcing their season. Each play was given a budget of about $80,000 and ticket prices were set at a very reasonable rate of about 4 to 8 dollars. (Now in fact, as we shall see even though most of these shows would end up actually being produced as planned, nobody seemed upset - there were other stars and other reliable delightful classic plays being produced in their place.

December 1, 1971: The Philadelphia Drama Guild opened Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, its first professional production. The Walnut Street Theatre, newly rebuilt and remodeled, was the venue.

In the cast were E.G. Marshall as the hypochondriac title character Argan, Ruby Dee played his wife Beline, and Tammy Grimes as the maid Toinette. But there were also Philadelphia actors in the company, including Doug Wing and Patrick Cronin. The set was designed by the Philadelphian Clarke Dunham, but the direction was by Broadway regular Stephen Porter. And in the midst of it all as preparations came for opening night, was Dr. Bloom, who amazingly was also keeping up with his dentistry practice at the same time, and was keeping costs low by drawing no salary as a producer. William Ross had the title Artistic Director - but it was clear who was calling the shots.

Enthusiasm for the new professional Drama Guild amongst local audiences was overwhelming. And here’s an interesting twist - and now you’ll see why in our last episode I had to talk so much about new theater construction throughout the city. The Drama Guild was not going to perform only in one place - the Walnut Street Theater/Arts Center was also created to host films and concerts and dance performances, after all. So a theater group could rent it only for certain blocks of time, and it couldn’t be there every week throughout the season as a resident company with an unbroken schedule of plays. The same went for the brand new Annenberg Center in West Philadelphia. So…. the Drama Guild arranged with both venues to do parts of each show in their season in both theaters - two weeks at the Walnut, one at the Zellerbach. It was a little confusing, and it required a lot of logistics moving the sets about, and everything, but everyone went with it. And right away, Dr. Bloom had to invoke the flexibility clause in their business model. For the week’s extension of the run of Imaginary Invalid at the Zellerbach Suddenly neither Randolph nor Marshall was available. The actor Leonard Frey, who had recently been seen as Motel the Tailor in the recently released film Fiddler on the Roof, took over the title role.

And to tell the truth, Philadelphia audiences kinda liked all the excitement! Well-known actors coming and going, lots of stories in the newspapers, if not deeply rehearsed, productions were going up. People were meeting all their friends at the theater, big politicians like Governor Shapp were coming to opening nights - it was fun. And local critics praised Stephen Porter’s directions of the Moliere play - indeed, in a weird kind of synergy, the touring production of another Moliere play that Porter had just directed, School For Wives, starring Brian Bedford, was coming to town that same week at the Forrest Theatre a few blocks up Walnut Street.

In January of 1972, the Drama Guild brought in its next show, with - now - John Randolph starring as agreed, as the big corrupt politician Harry Brock in Garson Kanin’s 1946 political comedy Born Yesterday. Diana Sands - who had been announced for the show - had needed to drop out of the show, so she was replaced by Chita Rivera. Early Hyman was also in the cast. You’ll notice that right from the start the Drama Guild was establishing a policy of casting talented actors in classic roles regardless of their race, which had in fact been their policy almost from their very founding - so that was very admirable.

Their next show, opening March 1st, was yet another classic comedy - clearly the Drama Guild was going to keep a good thing going while it had it, but with some changes on the fly - Sheridan’s The School for Scandal replacing his play The Rivals on the bill. And since apparently Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy had dropped out, they got the TV star Imogene Coca as Mrs. Malaprop, while her husband King Donovan did Bob Acres. Again there some professional Philadelphia actors like Doug Wing and Jim Lambert in smaller roles, and again local audiences and critics were giddy in praise of the eventual result, although some of the critics did point out that the show was somewhat under-rehearsed to their eyes.

For its final production of the season, in April 1971, was Ben Jonson’s commedia dell-arte style farce Volpone, about a Venetian miser who tricks his enemies into thinking that he is dying and is going to leave one of them his fortune in his will. So everyone showers him with presents and favors, hoping to become his only heir, only to learn that he is not actually dying at all - but by the end the trickster is himself deceived. Now, Volpone was a very popular play in the 1970s, and it was being presented by many leading theater troupes around the world, even though it was sometimes difficult for modern audiences to make out all of Jonson’s Elizabethan-era wordplay. The Guild, to overcome this difficulty, was using a modern adaptation of the text, which had rather tidied things up a bit. Anyway, it had managed to snag Howard Da Silva to play Volpone, and Ken Howard as his chief nemesis, Mosca. 

The opening night of Volpone went like gangbusters, and the cast showered the audience with gold and silver coins during the curtain call. The coins were fake, of course, but they served to hype up the excitement even more. The critic William Collins, reported in the Sunday Inquirer that even after the house lights came up - the moment when traditionally Philly audiences would all grab their coats and race for the parking lot, instead they stayed in the seats! They kept facing the stage! They kept applauding! Finally Da Silva and Howard were summoned out from their dressing rooms, now half out of their costumes, together with the rest of the company came out to bow again! “Nothing like that had happened in the course of the Philadelphia Drama Guild’s first professional season,” Collins wrote, in fact he couldn’t recall such a thing happening in Philadelphia ever, except maybe when Pearl Bailey had come to town in Hello Dolly. This was heady enthusiasm for a non-profit regional company - the first season of the Drama Guild had been a roaring success. 

The only question was: would those now 18,000 subscribers return for the NEXT season of the Drama Guild? Had Philadelphia found its own indisputable number one namesake nonprofit theater resident company at last?

The big problem was, of course, that the instability in the artistic model of the company would result in instability in its finances. How long could the Theatre Guild keep promising their subscribers certain big name actors and shows, only to cancel them at the last minute and bring somebody else in - and some different script in - instead? At first their plan was to market the next season as coming from a pool of possible big names - everyone from Zero Mostel to Moses Gunn to E.G. Marshall, but eventually they settled on a season that they could actually deliver - and I gotta say, it was a doozy. First they presented to subscribers a production of Molieres’ Tartuffe starring Richard Kiley - best known for Man of La Mancha, of course, played the dastardly hypocrite and a young actress named Bernadette Peters in the soubrette role of Dorine, in a company all led by the up-and-coming young director Michael Kahn. Following that was the real-life husband and wife couple Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in Jean Anuoilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors, and then there was Tom Ewell in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and finally Douglas Turner Ward in the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. So, finally, a little less comedy.

But the Drama Guild evidently was keeping its reputation amongst the New York acting community, because big names kept coming to the Philly in the THIRD Drama Guild season of 1973-74 which opened with Maureen Stapleton and Jerry Orbach in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, then Tammy Grimes, again, played Kate in Taming of the Shrew, opposite Ron O’Neal as Petruchio, who was best known for being a different kind of badass in the hit film Superfly. (We should note perhaps that the production was directed by the Canadian director Malcolm Black, who was going to regularly keep on directing shows at the Walnut Street Theatre over the next forty years.) Sidney Bloom DDS was still keeping a firm hand on programming and finances, but the company was no longer doing additional runs over in West Philadelphia at the Zellerbach, which began looking itself for more adventurous programming than the Drama Guild was ready to provide. In fact, audiences and critics alike were starting to notice a certain thrown-together quality to the Drama Guild’s productions, with actors all bringing their own idiosyncratic interpretations to their roles. This would have been normal for star appearances at the Walnut or the Chestnut Street Theatre in the 19th Century, say back in the 1830s, but by the late 20th century people had come to expect a unified production.

And by February of 1974 that tendency to disunity became all too real, when the company of Death of a Salesman arrived in town.

Now this production of Arthur Miller's iconic play was a real coup for the Drama Guild. It was the 25th anniversary of Death of Salesman, which - as you know, if you’ve read that chapter in my book, ahem - had its world premiere at the Locust Street Theatre, en route to Broadway in January of 1949.

But Miller had been reluctant to see the play re-staged on Broadway since that amazing original production. Indeed, it had not been staged within a 100-mile radius of New York City since 1949. And in his standard contract for the play, Arthur Miller always insisted on being able to visit and supervise the final week of rehearsals of any production at all.

Martin Balsam and Teresa Wright had been cast as Willy and Linda Loman, and Balsam had personally asked his friend the movie actor George C. Scott to be the show’s director, based on his success with a recent New York production of The Andersonville Trial. In fact, Scott (who had recently refused to accept an Oscar award for his work on the film "Patton") had declared he mostly wanted to direct from now on.

As was usual for a Drama Guild production that used major New York talent, the first three weeks of rehearsal were in New York, and then the company came down to Philadelphia, and were staying and rehearsing at the Adelphia Hotel at 13th and Chestnut Streets.

But by now apparently there were tensions within the cast. Both Balsam and Wright were reportedly frustrated that Scott mostly did complete run-throughs, rather than ever breaking down the show and working on individual scenes. He would then give extensive notes, frequently giving the actors (especially Balsam) impassioned  line readings. It seemed evident to many that George C. Scott would very much like to play the role of Willy Loman himself.

Reportedly, Scott had not been aware when he agreed to direct the show that Miller would come down to observe and oversee the production in this last week. After rehearsal on Thursday the 23rd, he went off for a one and half hour-long interview in the Adephia's restaurant with Inquirer reporter Howard Coffin. The actor, according to the reporter, spoke at length about himself, and seemed in a good mood - but Coffin would remember how Scott downed at least five vodkas and two beer chasers during their talk. When their time was up, Scott left, saying he had to meet Miller for dinner and discuss the show.

Well. Whatever happened at that dinner, it didn't go well. The next day, Philly newspapers announced that Miller was taking over direction of the show. The excuse was that Scott had a "bad cold" - but that flimsy story soon was revealed as being a polite fiction. He had gone to Mexico, where his wife, Trish Van de Vere, was scouting locations for their next movie.

So, Arthur Miller guided the production through its final week of rehearsal, and it opened on February 28th, to mostly positive reviews. But here’s the thing I still haven’t totally confirmed yet - that same month, Zubin Mehta was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at the the Academy of Music - did Miller take Martin Balsam to go and hear it, to inspire him in the part of Willy with Beethoven’s magnificent music - and then later, when he was writing his memoir Timebends, mix that concert up with the first performances of Salesman, back in 1949? I’m still waiting for someone who has read that chapter in my book to either confirm or deny it. I thought that’s what everybody was going to write about! . . . . I still think I’m right. 

A lot changed over the next few years at the Walnut Street Theatre, where Richard Duprey now headed the non-profit, spearheading the drive to turn the upper floors of the adjacent building into more rehearsal rooms, studios and offices. Duprey was also determined to do more programming that explicitly invited the city’s African American population into the space, and was casting a grim eye on the Drama Guild, his main tenant, which wasn’t alway great about paying its rent on time for the weeks that it took over the Walnut’s stage.

Things were also changing at the Drama Guild itself. In the summer of 1974, the nonprofit’s board, dissatisfied with the uneven quality of the productions, hired the 62-year-old British director Douglas Seale to be its new Artistic Director. Douglas Seale had been steadily working both in London and in Canada for years now, and he was able to bring along a core of company of reliable repertory actors to Philadelphia, as well as recruit from the growing number of excellent classically trained actors coming out of Canada and England in those day, such as the marvelous Paxton Whitehead, who himself directed the season’s opening show - Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance. All that season, the local critics purred over the results, but the original founder of the company, Sidney Bloom, DDS, was increasingly frustrated - repeatedly butting heads with both Seale and the company’s new business Manager, James D. Freydberg. Bloom felt that he should still have final say over all business and programming decisions as he had done for the past 20 years.

In the spring of 1976, it all came out into the open when Sidney Bloom fired Freydberg as Business Manager, but then did not reckon with the Board where Freydberg still had a vote. In fact, it turned out that a majority of the Board were totally on Freydberg and Seale’s side. A month later, a vote was taken, and suddenly Freydberg was rehired, and the company cut all ties with its founder. It was hard to comprehend for many of his loyal fans, but Sid Bloom - and his conservative and traditional approach to theater, as many accused - was out of the Drama Guild. Permanently.

I can’t possibly follow every twist and turn of board politics - nor can I talk about every play the Drama Guild produced in the 1970s - there were a lot - but let’s at least look at a couple:

March 11, 1977: John Glover was now Philadelphia's favorite Hamlet. Theatergoers were mobbing the box office.

The production at the Philadelphia Drama Guild had just opened the night before, and it was already a hit. The run had been extended to March 31st, which was as far as the company could manage to hold its rental of the Walnut Street Theatre stage.

This was all a mystery to many of the local critics, many of whom had mixed opinions about director Douglas Seale's staging of Hamlet. But Philadelphia's verdict was in, and only a scattering of seats remained for the entire three-week run, as well as the four extra performances the Drama Guild had managed to tack on.

Seale had cut the text drastically, and moved the time frame so that the actors were costumed in Edwardian Era clothes, rather than Elizabethan. The emphasis was on action, with a thrilling duel between Hamlet and Laertes in the final act.

And it must have been the appeal of John Glover, then 33 years old. Already popular in Philly due to his previous appearances with the Drama Guild, he had been ostentatiously walking the streets of the city, dressed entirely in black, just like the Melancholy Dane. He would even rehearse his lines with the waitstaff at Cobblestones Restaurant in Society Hill, or Judy's Bar at Third and Bainbridge.

As he cradled a bottle of beer at Judy's one evening after a show, wearing a black peasant's blouse, black pants, and black boots, Glover told a local journalist that he believed that only by living life as fully as possible could he develop the inventory of experiences and insights an actor must have to be effective. "If I don't have a life, I can't be an actor."

November 30, 1977: Tom Stoppard's play Travesties began a three-week run at the Walnut, as part of the Philadelphia Drama Guild Season.

Artistic Director Douglas Seale was the director of the show, whose cast included Paxton Whitehead as the British diplomat Henry Carr, who in a remarkable entrance emerged from under the stage playing upon an organ. The dazzling theatrical spectacle only got better from there, as Stoppard's mash-up of how an amateur production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich during the First World War coincided with the presence in the city of novelist James Joyce, artist Tristan Tzara, and the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.

It was quite an ambitious season overall for the Drama Guild, which had begun in the fall with George Kelly's comedy The Show Off. In early 1978 they were to produce both George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Although the original plan was for the Drama Guild to produce a six play season (the Drama Guild was playing to audiences that were 90% full in the 1100-seat Walnut Street house)! Still, an accumulated debt of over $100,000 was worrying the board, so only four plays were offered.

Although Philadelphia theater critics were delighted with the production of Travesties and dazzled by Stoppard's comic wordplay and historical insight, there had been some dissent among longtime Drama Guild board members and theatergoers at the play's relentless intellectualism. Critic Williams Collins noted that many of the audience left after the first act, "baffled, or angry, or both."

September 24, 1979: The Drama Guild, still the only local producing organization in the city who regularly offered contracts to Actors' Equity members, held the first-ever city-wide auditions for professional actors who actually lived in the Philadelphia area.

It was an important moment for the Philadelphia theater community, whose small but growing number of professional performers were finally getting a little respect - more than they had ever gotten during the city's long-held status as a "tryout town" certainly. Previously all auditions for paying gigs took place only in New York. But now they would do them in Philly.

Wrote the journalist Edgar Wideman in the Inquirer: “But the times, they are a-changing, and one of the first moves by Gregory Poggi, who became managing director of the company only two months ago, was to hold auditions here for actors residing in the area. Nearly 100 Equity actors showed up yesterday. . . .”

So, what had changed at the Drama Guild, and who was this Gregory Poggi? Well, ladies and gentlemen, tune in next time to find out - because we are finally going to begin the much-promised series of shows where I will bring you interviews with actual participants in the events of Philadelphia Theater History. 

Gregory Poggi, whom I spoke with via telephone, back in November of last year, will be our first of these subjects, and he has a lot of fascinating information and insights for us, as he helps to tell the story about what happened to the Drama Guild during his tenure at the organization, which spanned the entire decade of the 1980s!

Meanwhile, if you haven’t gotten a copy already, look for Adventures in Theater History, Philadelphia - the book! Go ask for it now at your local independent bookstore, or order it online wherever fine books are sold. If you enjoy it - remember to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads so that other good folks can learn about it, too. And you really would be giving me a hand, I would appreciate it. Support us on Patreon - and here I give a shout out to Richard, who only last month signed up as a sustaining member - the links are in the show notes. Or, leave a review about the show on Apple Podcasts.

And, as I should add, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky.. Or you can write to us - our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com write us - and let us know what you think . There is no extensive blog post this time, I’m afraid, the upcoming semester of teaching approaches next week, and I have to get ready for that. But I’ll try and throw a few pictures and images of some of the stories we mentioned today, at least. Thank you for listening to us and for joining us on yet another adventure in Theater History, Philadelphia.

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