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An icon unbowed

The oldest working U.S. theater has seen many stars - and an unrivaled subscriber stream.

Theatergoers leave a matinee production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the theater, which has been at Ninth and Walnut from the start. (Sharon Gekoski Kimmel / Staff Photographer)
Theatergoers leave a matinee production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the theater, which has been at Ninth and Walnut from the start. (Sharon Gekoski Kimmel / Staff Photographer)Read more

Theater lore tells us that the spirits of long-dead actors materialize late each night to haunt the stages they once trod - which must make the Walnut Street Theatre the most crowded after-hours stage in America.

And tomorrow night, when the lights go down at the oldest working theater in the United States, there will be ghost toasts galore to its 200th birthday.

Houdini, Marlon Brando, Paul Robeson, and all four Marx Brothers will lift the bubbly, tapping glasses with Helen Hayes and Ethel Waters, all the Booths and Barrymores, and the unrelated Hepburns - Audrey and Katharine - plus scores more, even Buffalo Bill.

Before the ghosts take over, an invited flesh-and-blood audience will fill the red plush seats to watch performers from the theater's last few decades in a gala bicentennial tribute to one of Philadelphia's grande dames.

Even though it has never left its corner of Ninth and Walnut Streets, the Walnut has come a long way since it opened Feb. 2, 1809, as the New Circus, with a huge dome that towered over every other building in the city, a dirt ring for animal acts, and a troupe of actors to enliven the proceedings.

Longevity accounts for only one of two records the Walnut Street Theatre holds. The other: As its third century begins, the Walnut has more than 56,000 season subscribers to its main-stage, third-floor-stage and children's productions, making it the most-subscribed-to theater in the United States, topping the 50,000-plus at Los Angeles' three-stage Center Theatre Group and the 44,000-plus Roundabout Theatre Company in New York.

In the Philadelphia region, where a healthy theatergoing public supports more than two dozen professional companies and buys more than a million tickets here and 800,000 to Broadway each year, the Walnut's mission to produce for the widest possible audience accounts for much of its ticket-selling success.

At the region's other largest theaters - which often stage works that take more chances or untested premieres - annual subscriptions range from 3,000 to 9,000. For them, the Walnut can act as a source of theatergoers who want to explore further.

"A lot of people here would not experience theater if it were not for the Walnut," says Sara Garonzik, who heads Philadelphia Theatre Company, which has a new theater on Broad Street. "Ultimately, what's good for one theater is good for all the others."

The Walnut's popularity also means that, in a turnabout for nonprofit regional theater, it earns much more at the box office than it gets in contributions from foundations, corporations, individuals and the government.

"The fact that the Walnut puts its greatest energies into earned income means that Philadelphia is unique," says Terrence J. Nolen, who heads the Arden Theatre Company, which began at the Walnut in a revenue-sharing deal 21 years ago. Nolen says the region's other major professional theaters have been able to draw from a larger well of philanthropy because the Walnut has not been very dependent on gifts.

Now, however, it is about to turn to the philanthropic community for help with its next act. Having already acquired most of the land (a parking lot) immediately to its east, the Walnut plans to raise money for a complex that would include, among other things, a theater in the round - with 400 more seats for eager subscribers.

Back to producing

Bernard Havard, the Walnut's president and producing artistic director, came to town in 1982 and returned the theater to its roots - as a producer of shows, rather than a simple booker of others' productions.

He runs the main-stage series with a laser focus on filling the 1,088 seats. Some may call his show choices solidly middlebrow - a label he brushes off like a gnat on an otherwise nice day.

"We produce populist theater," he says. "That means being accessible. It means being relevant. It means having your house full. If I were the pastor of a church - and the theater for me is not a vast stretch from a church - I'd want all my pews filled."

Filled seats are a hallmark of Havard's leadership, for which he was paid about $370,000 last year. His model for a main-stage season: three musicals, a comedy and a drama. The Walnut's overall heft means it usually wins the rights to fill those slots because it can guarantee enormous box office, part of which reverts to the owners of rights to musicals and plays.

At the same time, the theater's ability to stage elaborate productions costs it money, because it bids for shows still on national tours - this season's Hairspray, for instance - and for expensive blockbusters. It paid top dollar to be among the first theaters in the world to restage Les Misérables in its own way last season. In May, it will open The Producers and pay 14 percent of its box-office gross to Mel Brooks and his colleagues who own the show; other solid local theaters pay closer to 10 percent for less-current musicals.

Havard, born in Britain and raised in Canada, thought his theatrical life was all about Chekhov, Strindberg, Shakespeare and the classics - "I have to say, I was a true elitist from college on" - until his epiphany when he was a stage manager one summer at Rainbow Stage in Winnipeg, where musicals are a specialty.

"I saw people who wanted to be at a show, rather than people who were coming because we were putting on a show. That was a defining moment for me, and I reveled in it. I tried to learn as much as I could about the American musical theater, and I realized how important an art form it is."

Yet, he says, "I still don't want a steady diet of musicals. For me, they are the cherry on top of a sundae. They're rich, and a steady diet becomes too sweet. A season requires balance."

That balance will not include the classics, by and large. You won't see Shakespeare, a mainstay of the Walnut's first century; the Bard's plays have been banned for 23 seasons, ever since Havard figured out that 26 percent of all subscribers didn't show up for them - far more than the normal 9 percent.

"A lot of our audience was viewing it as cultural castor oil," he says, "and it was affecting our subscription rate."

Havard, who with Walnut general manager Mark D. Sylvester wrote an illustrated Walnut history published last year as part of the Images of America book series, looks back for guidance. "At every point when the Walnut failed, went into foreclosure or management changes," he says, "every time it had to do with programming that didn't appeal to the populace. At the Walnut, whenever you were not honest about appealing to people, you went belly-up."

For the Walnut, the balance to a season heavy with musicals comes in a play like Tennessee Williams' steamy A Streetcar Named Desire, among the many treasures of American theater that in the old days of pre-Broadway tours either premiered or played there. The Walnut is currently presenting Streetcar, which ended its pre-Broadway tryout tour on the same stage, with Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Karl Malden, in 1947.

In the Walnut's modern era - since it began producing in 1983 - it has never repeated a show. That will happen for the first time next season with Oliver!, the first musical staged during that initial season under Havard.

Just how big the Walnut has become is obvious when it is compared with the region's other large companies: Arden, the Wilma, Philadelphia Theatre Company, People's Light, Bristol Riverside and Delaware Theatre Company. They report revenue up to about $5 million and assets up to about $8 million. The Walnut's revenue approaches $14 million, its assets $20 million.

In addition to its main-stage and more intimate productions in the 80-seat Studio 3, the Walnut runs a series for children, a theater school, and two troupes that perform in schools - currently with an attention-getting play about girl bullies.

Decades of change

For all its present success and its staying power, the Walnut Street Theatre has not exactly been a house of hits over its two centuries.

It has gone through many ownerships, major interior makeovers and redecorations, and identity changes. In 1811 it was converted from circus to theater and named the Olympic, and in 1812 it staged its first full-length production, Sheridan's The Rivals. In 1820, after a major renovation, it became the Walnut Street Theatre and had a boffo season. In 1822, it went back to being a circus. In 1828, it was a theater again - and a theater it stayed.

The Walnut was the scene of the first curtain call (1821). It was the first theater to install gas footlights (1837) and a form of air-conditioning (1855). It was the site of the first campaign debate involving a sitting president (Gerald Ford vs. challenger Jimmy Carter, 1976).

Its tribulations and triumphs play out like a melodrama. In fact, the Walnut is not just part of American theater history. It mirrors American theater history. For much of its early life, actors came from abroad to play with the Walnut's "stock" house - a group of locals who specialized in various character types and shifted to a different play each night.

After the Civil War, new railroads gave producers an easy way to send scenery, costumes and actors to the hinterlands from the burgeoning theater district of New York, making it, not Philadelphia, the new focal point.

As Philadelphia lost prominence in the 1880s and '90s, the Walnut increasingly became an out-of-town venue for New York shows. Then, when the notion of Broadway emerged in the early 20th century, the Walnut morphed again, into a pre-Broadway tryout house - a role in which it thrived until the costly tryout system began to fade in the 1970s.

Around that time, the federal government ordered the Shubert organization, which owned every legitimate theater in Philadelphia, to divest itself of several, including the Walnut, which it had owned since 1941.

The Shuberts sold it to the Haas Foundation - now the William Penn Foundation - in 1969; the theater was restored under the leadership of civic activist Philip Klein and for the next decade operated as a general performance space. The city's Dance Affiliates series, now at the Annenberg Center, grew out of a program there in the early 1970s, when Dance Affiliates artistic director Randy Swartz ran the Walnut. Finally, in 1983, the current theater company was formed.

Part of the reason the building has lived to reach 200 is a fortunate decision in the beginning: to build it of brick, not the more commonly used wood. That spared it the fires that destroyed many theaters of the day, says Andrew Davis, whose history of the Walnut - America's Longest Run - will be published this year by Penn State University Press.

"Nothing brought it down," Davis says. "But more than anything else, it is a survivor that has adapted to new eras. It was preserved not because anybody had the sense that this is an important and historic place - perhaps not until the 1960s - but that they had a use for it every time," he says.

"It survived all these huge economic downturns because someone was always at hand to try new approaches. All the changes in theater - and in business models - the Walnut has adapted to."