Pennsylvania's early Quakers did their best to outlaw popular theater, song, and other sinful leisure amusements and diversions. By the later 1700s, however, Philadelphia was the theater capital of the nation. In the generations that followed, Pennsylvanians would play significant roles in the development of American show "business" and the commodification of entertainment.
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1749 |
First recorded theatrical performance in Pennsylvania. |
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1754 |
Lewis Hallam's Company arrives from London and establishes the first permanent theater in Pennsylvania, built on the side of South Street that was just outside the city limits of Philadelphia. |
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1760 |
Hallam's Company opens the Southwark Theater at Fourth and South Streets-also outside the city limits of Philadelphia. |
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1761 |
The Privy Council in England strikes down the Pennsylvania legislature's attempt to ban all theater in the Pennsylvania colony. |
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1774 |
As a wartime measure, the First Continental Congress bans all theatrical performances. This ban lasts until 1789. |
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1793 |
Englishman John Bill Ricketts gives America its first complete circus performance in his building at 12th and Market Streets in Philadelphia. |
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1794 |
Opening of Philadelphia's 1,165-seat Chestnut Street Theater, the largest theater in North America. |
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1820 |
Opening of Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater, today the oldest playhouse in continuous use in the English-speaking world. |
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1826 |
Philadelphia actor Edwin Forrest makes an unheard-of $200 a night headlining as Othello in New York's Bowery Theater. For the next forty years Forrest would reign unchallenged as the America's greatest actor. |
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1838 |
Philadelphia trumpeter and composer Frank Johnson leads his African-American band on a tour of Europe, and gives a command performance for England's Queen Victoria. |
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1848 |
Stephen Foster's "Ethiopian" song "Oh Susanna" sweeps across the nation and cements his reputation as the nation's hottest songwriter. |
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1849 |
The competition between Philadelphian Edwin Forrest and British actor William Charles Macready over who is the greatest actor in the English-speaking world explodes into rioting outside New York City's Astor Place Theater. When it is over, at least twenty-two were dead, and as many as 150 wounded. |
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1853 |
Circus impresario Dan Rice establishes headquarters in Girard, just east of Erie, Pennsylvania, in easy reach of the railroad lines that carry his one-ring circus across the country. Rice goes on to become one of the most successful entertainers of the 19th century, and serves as the model for Uncle Sam. |
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1862 |
Louisa Lane Drew becomes the manager of Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater, the first female theater manager in the nation. In the decades that follow Mrs. Drew is matriarch of the Barrymores, one of the nation's great theatrical families. |
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1864 |
Stephen Foster dies penniless in New York at the age of thirty-seven. |
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1866 |
Philadelphia character actor Joseph Jefferson introduces the character of Rip Van Winkle to the American stage. Jefferson goes on to become the nation's most popular comic actor of the late nineteenth century. |
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1879 |
James Bland publishes "O Dem Golden Slippers," a popular minstrel tune later adopted as the official song of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. In the following decade Bland would become the world's most famous composer of minstrel songs. |
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1888 - 1888 |
German-American inventor Emile Berliner gives the first public demonstration of the gramophone at the Philadelphia's Franklin Institute |
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1891 |
Thomas Edison takes out a patent on the nation's first motion picture camera and projector, the Kinetoscope |
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1896 |
Thomas Edison patents Vitascope, a method of filming short moving pictures that he could project onto a screen for paying audiences. |
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1896 |
John Philip Sousa and his Orchestra play at the opening of the Willow Grove Amusement Park. Sousa will play there each summer until 1928. |
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1897 |
The Berliner Gramophone Company opens the nation's first professional recording studio and retail record shop in downtown Philadelphia |
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1898 |
Pittsburgh art-song composer Ethelbert Nevin plays "The Rosary" the same day the battleship Maine is sunk in Havana Harbor. "The Rosary" goes on to become one of the best-selling songs of the early 1900s. |
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1899 |
Philadelphia optician turned filmmaker Siegmund Lubin opens his first movie theater in Philadelphia. Based first in Philadelphia and then near Valley Forge, Lubin Films will become one of the nation's largest motion picture companies before a fire in 1914 destroys his film vault. |
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1903 |
Edison cameraman Edwin S. Porter of Connellsville, PA, produces The Great Train Robbery, the nation's first feature film. |
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1905 |
John Harris and Harry Davis partition off part of their Pittsburgh penny arcade to make room for a theater devoted exclusively to motion pictures and charge a nickel for entrance. Such establishments will come to be known as "nickelodeons." |
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1905 |
Victor Talking Machine Company opens its first recording studio at Tenth and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia. |
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1906 |
The Warner Brothers - Harry, Sam, and Albert - open their first movie house in the Cascade Theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The next year the brothers started the Duquesne Amusement and Supply Company in Pittsburgh, then moved to Hollywood where they built one of the nation's largest and most successful motion picture studios. |
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1906 |
The Mishler Theater, built by businessman John D. Mishler, opens in Altoona. Constructed along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, this theater - the crown jewel in a circuit of theaters owned by Mishler that stretches from Lancaster to Allentown - attracts the biggest touring acts in the nation. |
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1908 |
Samuel "Roxy" Rothapfel opens a nickelodeon in the back room of a saloon in Forest City, PA. By 1930, Rothapfel owns a chain of lavish motion picture palaces. In 1932 he will become the first manager of New York's Radio City Music Hall, the nation's largest theater. |
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1910 |
Movie mogul Siegmund Lubin opens Lubinville, a motion picture studio in North Philadelphia that boasts the world's most powerful lighting system and a stage large enough for five crews to shoot simultaneously. Two years later, Lubin converts the 500-acre Betzwood Estate in Valley Forge into an even larger movie studio with room to shoot both indoor and outdoor film scenes. |
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1911 |
Pennsylvania becomes the first state to pass a film censorship law. In the coming decades the Pennsylvania Board of Motion Picture Censors rejects hundreds of films, and requires the editing and removal of hundreds of scenes. |
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1914 |
African American entrepreneur John T. Gibson buys the Standard Theater in Philadelphia. An important stop of the black vaudeville circuit, the Standard helps launch the careers of Philadelphia natives Ethel Waters and the Nicholas Brothers. |
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1915 |
Philadelphia comic juggler William Claude Dukenfield, a.k.a. "W.C. Fields," gets his big break in show business when he signs a contract to star in the Ziegfeld Follies and also makes his first silent film. |
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1917 |
Tom Mix, of Mix Run PA, signs a contract with Fox Studios. Mix will make more than 350 films and become one of the great cowboy stars of the silent film era. |
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1919 |
Westinghouse Electric engineer Frank Conrad pulls his microphone close to a phonograph and begins to "broadcast" records from the radio station in his Pittsburgh garage. Within a decade, an emerging commercial radio industry will be revolutionizing the business of American popular music. |
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1921 |
Philadelphia's African American-owned Dunbar Theater hosts the all-black musical Shuffle Along, written by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissle. Later that year it becomes the first African American musical to appear on Broadway. |
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1922 |
John Barrymore's 101 consecutive performances of Hamlet on Broadway breaks the record set by Edwin Forrest almost a century earlier. |
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1923 |
The release of "Dinah" by Columbia Records catapults Philadelphia singer Ethel Waters to fame. |
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1929 |
Opening of the Mastbaum Theater in Philadelphia Mastbaum Theater at 20th and Market Street. Seating 5,000 it is the largest motion picture in Pennsylvania and third-largest in the nation. |
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1932 |
Olympic gold medallist Johnny Weissmuller, who was born in Windber, PA., stars in MGM Studios" Tarzan the Apeman. |
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1938 |
Director Frank Capra casts James Stewart of Indiana, PA, in You Can't Take It With You. In 1940 Stewart wins his first Oscar for The Philadelphia Story. |
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1940 |
Oscar Hammerstein II purchases Highland Farm, a 40-acre estate in Bucks County. In 1943 the opening of Oklahoma!, becomes the first of a series of Broadway musicals that makes Rodgers and Hammerstein the biggest names on Broadway. |
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1952 |
Pittsburgh song and dance man Gene Kelly stars in Singin" in the Rain, one of the most beloved Hollywood musicals of all time. |
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1955 |
Philadelphia's Grace Kelly wins an Academy Award, then leaves Hollywood at the height of her career to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco. |
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1956 |
Dick Clark becomes host of Philadelphia's Bandstand television program. In 1957 the show goes national and brings the music and dances of Philadelphia teenagers into homes across the country. |
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1958 |
The low budget science fiction cult classic film, The Blob is produced in Chester Springs PA. |
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1958 |
Founded in 1921 as a Jewish summer camp, the Tamiment Theater, known as "Broadway in the Poconos," has a banner year, with production of "The Princess and the Pea"- soon to go to Broadway - and comedy sketches by Woody Allen. |
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1959 |
After a short period of spectacular success and increasingly self-destructive behavior, Philadelphia singer Mario Lanza dies in Italy at the age of thirty-eight. |
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1968 |
Release of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in Pittsburgh. |
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1968 |
The African American Freedom Theater, on Broad Street in Philadelphia, opens in the house built by famed Philadelphia actor Edwin Forrest in 1853. |
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1976 |
Paul Robeson dies in Philadelphia, where he spent the last years of his life. |
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1984 |
Playwright August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom debuts on Broadway. Over the next two decades Wilson would pen nine more plays chronicling black life in twentieth-century America, nine of them set in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and win a record seven New York Drama Circle awards. |
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