“All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;”

William Shakespeare - (from As You Like It)

The Bristol Riverside Theatre made an audacious entrance when The Bristol Arts Theatre, a humiliation to the Bristol Borough community, made its exit! Generally, the theatre movement took off at the turn of the last century when films made their debut. Many small-town professional playhouses either closed due to the competition from the new art form or were converted to movie-houses. Theatre-lovers still want the real thing -- a live theatre.  The original Riverside Theatre was vaudeville, with “refined musical comedy” and a silent movie theatre.

The development of vaudeville, referring specifically to American variety entertainment, marked the inauguration of this well-liked diversion as big business, dependent on increased leisure time, spending power, and changing tastes of an urban middle class audience.  The great 3-reel feature of  “Life’s Game of Dice “ with “Sabaret, the famous dancer” in the leading role was presented on Saturday, March 29, 1913 for the matinee price of a nickel! All were welcome to the “Grand Democratic Rally” held at the Riverside Theatre on November 3, 1916 and “seats were reserved for ladies”.  Unfortunately, this multi-functional building was destroyed by a blaze in August of 1937, even though the “Bristol Consolidated Fire Department” attempted valiantly to quench the tongues of flame. A. and L. Sablosky announced that they were to purchase the property formerly owned by Lewis J. Bevan . Edward Lynn’s plan was to open an up-to-date “fireproof” theatre with “the very latest in the way of equipment” before Christmas.

Lynn was the manager of the Grand Theatre, Bristol’s lone picture house. The title was to be in the name of the “Grand Amusement Company of Bristol”. The theatre was to be “illuminated with colored lights to give a rainbow-effect, and would have restful chairs and air conditioning”. The same group, including the Sablosky brothers, also opened The Norris Theatre on December 22, 1930 on 63 E. Main Street in Norristown. .

The playhouse reopened in 1938 and was hailed as Bucks County’s finest! “According to the experts, the Bristol Theatre is generally acknowledged to be the safest building type in the world from a hazard point of view”.  The doors opened at 6:30 P.M. and the performance started at 7:30P.M. According to the promotions, “Hear for yourself this sound that makes the motion picture screen a living stage” for only $.10 for Children and $.25 for Adults! An opening show was “Hold ‘em Navy”, a sports drama framed by the annual Army-Navy football game. In operation until the mid 1960’s or early 1970’s, the “magnificent theater” was sold and then reopened as an adult movie house.

Thanks to the Grundy Foundation and an investment of over one million dollars to transform the dilapidated building into a state-of-the-art theater, The Bristol Riverside Theatre opened its doors in September 1987.

As attested on its web page, BRT has brought celebrated theater artists to the region in a number of capacities, including Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Micki Grant [multi-talented actress/singer/author/composer], Adrian Pasdar [“Chipper” in Top Gun], Kim Hunter, John Henry Redwood [appeared in Guys and Dolls and The Piano Lesson on Broadway], Stephen Schnetzer [voice-overs for commercials, most recently for Roc facial products], Keir Dullea [1984's 2010: The Year We Make Contact], Hugh O'Gorman [US Attorney Chuck Rodman on LAW & ORDER], Ron Link [actor/director], Susan Powell, Bethe B. Austin, Aileen Quinn, Rita Taggart, and Richard White [Beauty and the Beast (1991) (voice) .... Gaston]. Additionally, the theatre serves as a cultural nucleus for the community, with innovative programs for children's theatre, community concerts and exhibitions of local visual arts. The town funds the current theatre camp helping the adolescents ages 7 thru 12 to dip into their imaginations to “improv”.  An average community theatre doesn't aspire to professional status (although most aspire to professional standards). BRT is a professional theatre with professional actors and professional directors. The actors have the opportunity to rehearse on the stage on which they will perform.  The “scene shop” is located at Cedar and Market. New stage scenery sets are created for each play. The theatre is and will remain “one of the few places where people gather, mostly strangers, to listen to other people, live actors, reenact the stories of their lives.”

“Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,”

William Shakespeare - (from As You Like It)

www.brtstage.org

120 Radcliffe Street

Bristol, Pa  19007

215.785.0100 

Around the World in “Eighty +” Plays

Come; choose the best seat in the house [they’re all perfect, only 30 feet from the stage!] in the inviting 300-seat theater equipped with extraordinary lighting and sound technology. The audience becomes theirs, as the professional actors transcend the moment and cleverly guide you someplace else within the playwright's imagination and to the world the Bristol Riverside Theatre has so artfully created.

In 1984, while English writer Eric Blair, under the pen-name of George Orwell, concentrated on “Big Brother is Watching”, The Grundy Foundation commenced a long-range strategic planning process with the purchase of an adult movie house, previously a neighborhood family theatre, The Bristol Theatre, on the Delaware River. Len Snyder was the Executive Director at that time and they offered the newly acquired property to the Repertory Theatre of Bucks County (REPCO), a company dedicated to developing new plays and playwrights. Bucks County's first Equity Regional Theatre was born as the Bristol Riverside Theatre on 120 Radcliffe Street in 1987.

 Susan Davis Atkinson, who is sparklingly unique and fun, was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Upper Bucks outside Doylestown, a daughter of an insurance agent father and an elementary school teacher/ painter mom, along with her younger sister, Mary, who was a Math and Science teacher, currently a potter.   Susan recalls her first play “The Mad Woman of Chaillot” in which she performed with renowned actresses Laura Esterman and Blythe Danner, her classmates at The George School in Newtown.  She realized then that she was a “terrible actress” and that they “were wonderful” and she unfalteringly decided at age 13 to become a director! Susan continued her undergraduate studies, majoring in English and French at Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, which is included in the prestigious list of the top 100 Liberal Arts colleges throughout the nation. The University had secured a huge grant for the Arts, so Susan had the privilege of studying under the major poets and playwrights of this country. Respected playwright, poet, novelist and essayist [Everett] LeRoi Jones also known as Imanu Amiri Baraka, a Newark, NJ native and Harvard graduate, and Denise Levertov, one of the twentieth-century’s foremost American poets, born in Ilford, Essex, England impacted Susan phenomenally.  She feels her greatest challenge was the first show she directed at the newly opened theatre, “The Good Earth”, which was Bucks County based by Pearl Buck.  A narrator was required to cut down the length of the 4½ hour- long piece and 6 tons of dirt was needed for the stage. Her set designer was one of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s original designers. Brecht led the Berliner Ensemble and “was a seminal thinker of the theatre in the 20^th century”.

Susan hired [Edward] Keith Baker as an actor when he auditioned for a part in the NY play “ Murrow”, at that time a new play about Edward R. Murrow, the most renowned figure, "patron saint of American broadcasting" in the history of American broadcast journalism. Keith appeared as Frank Stanton, the distinguished broadcast executive known for the leadership he brought to CBS, Inc. during his 25- year presidency (1946--71). The author actually altered the part because Keith was so good! Keith was born in Macon, GA and raised by his opera singer mom who used the stage name of Leigh Harlowe in the NY City and Philadelphia Opera Companies.  From the age of 11, he and his sister, Shirley grew up in the upper West side of Manhattan, NY. Not an intimation of a New York or a Southern accent, he always wanted to be a Shakespearean actor.  His brother, Sean is a NY Real Estate broker, and his brother Mark runs Mitsubishi Printing Presses in Chicago, IL. The Ford Motor Company in Beirut, in the Middle East, employed Keith’s late father. As a Southern boy, with then a thick Southern accent, he experienced an expensive all male prep school education, with Henry Winkler as a classmate, at McBurney School in New York City. Ted Koppel and JD Salinger also attended and graduated from McBurney.  Keith, 17 at the time, chose to continue his education at the Neighborhood Playhouse School Of The Theater on E 54th St in Manhattan to study under Sanford Meisner, a leading acting teacher who trained some of the most famous performers of the stage and screen.

"Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed." - Elia Kazan [one of America's great directors, recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award].

Keith is an alumnus of The Juilliard School, which is recognized as one of the best performing arts conservatories in the world. He sang high tenor opera, with a repertoire of high c’s and d’s, low end of g’s & f’s. He starred in the original road company of “Fiddler on the Roof” as “Now I Have Everything”, Perchick, full of fire and brimstone. His favorite performances were Don Quixote in “ Man of La Mancha”, who sets out to fight injustice in the name of his beloved maiden Dulcinea del Toboso; and what he feels is his greatest lead dramatic performance as Sir Thomas Moore in the “Man for All Seasons”.  Per Susan, he was incredible as the inept and paranoid Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny” based on the 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk.

During the 1980’s he owned the Florida Repertory Theatre in the Palm Beach area. [Repertory is a Standard English term in the theatre meaning a company that performs a series of plays one after the other, often using the same actors.]  When he returned to NY [he loves NY!] in 1991 to continue his career, he auditioned for a play at a theatre in which he had never heard; the 3- year old Bristol Riverside Theatre, and he met Susan.

Bristol Borough residents, Susan D. Atkinson, Founding Producing Director and Keith Baker, Artistic Director, married to Joan [an actress, stage name of Jo Twiss, whom he met at the BRT] are filled with a celebratory attitude as the Bristol Riverside Theatre enters its twentieth season. There are few things that touch a person more intensely than an extraordinary work of art or an excellent dramatic or musical performance.  Bristol Borough has always been an exquisite place in which to live, per Real Estate listings “an enviable and desirable theatre district” and a truly fun place to visit.  Pictures throughout the town, depicting old scenes of the only significant town between the Delaware River and Doylestown, show the original Grand Theater on Mill Street, owned by the famous producer, John Kenley, with limousines parked in front. Theatergoers are dressed in their finest furs walking on Radcliffe Street, similar to a 5^th Avenue in NYC scene.  “The theatre has always been an economic engine in the town.”

Brad Little, who stars in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera [the youngest Phantom ever], performed in “Baby” at BRT for 2 months. He and his actress wife also met in the BRT and purchased a house here in town. Dyslexia propelled Little towards music. He was never able to read music proficiently, but he flourished as a singer because of his ear, voice and memory.

“If it has keys, I will play it for you,” Keith shares.  After having been the Musical Director, he assumed the role of Artistic Director in 1997.  His first musical play at BRT was “Two By Two” by Richard Rodgers.  “Danny Kaye starred in it on Broadway. It didn’t work for Danny Kaye, either!”

Keith stresses the important distinction that “BRT is a Professional Theatre that uses only professional actors who belong to Actors Equity Association and professional directors. Acting is their career, not their avocation or a hobby.

We have all spent countless years perfecting our art. The difference between amateur and professional is their commitment to craft. This is not a local community theatre.  This is a “Non-for-Profit Regional Theatre with a mission to provide the highest quality professional theatre with prices that are accessible to everyone.  We try to supplant short falls in earned income with fundraising, foundation, corporate and private support.”

What a source of pride for Bristol Borough! Tickets for this high quality professional theatre are only $35.00! There is FREE parking, great restaurants within walking distance and seating in which “tall men can stretch their legs”.

“What is offered here is something that is secure, that is beautiful. When you come to the Bristol Riverside you come for the evening for a magnificent event.”

All shows are family friendly, chosen to embrace the largest audience of people.

The passion of the performers is potent in every presentation!

Call 215-785-0100, or check the website: www.brtstage.org.