Last month, the Devon Theater, a professional production house in a working-class neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, canceled the final half of its inaugural season due to state budget constraints.

In going through some documents of mine, I found, perhaps prophetically, a story that never was from back in March when the Devon first reopened. Originally planned for Philadelphia Weekly, its working slug title was ‘Can the Devon survive in Mayfair?’

Perhaps that hope now seems less likely. Below, I share the piece that didn’t run (for a variety of reasons) and some extras from the reporting.

Before writing this piece for PW, I covered the Devon’s reopening heavily, additionally for the Inquirer, NEastPhilly.com and uwishunu.

As originally written March 2009 and, boy, do I feel like my writing has grown some even in the ensuing months.

Kathleen Murray has already seen ‘Nunsense’ – years ago somewhere in Center City, she said.

But she’s not going to miss the chance to see one of the first live performances held at the resurrected Devon Theater.

So Murray, 76, bought tickets and also became a proud Devon volunteer. Last Saturday [3/14], she had orientation and looks forward serving as an usher, helping with ticketing or costumes or with the summer camp.

She’s an active theatergoer, supporting venues like the Arden and the Keswick, but says there is something special about the Devon being in Mayfair, her blue-collar Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood. That kind of support, Devon executives say, is just what they need to make professional theater work eight miles and a social class or two from Center City.

In Aug. 2004, the Mayfair Community Development Corporation, which has maintained ownership, bought the Devon for $800,000. The 65-year-old roof allowed severe water damage. There was termite-infestation, collapse and decay. As part of an expansive, $6 million plan to reshape the surrounding Frankford Avenue corridor, the CDC wanted to bring theater to the cavernous former adult movie playhouse.

There is little question that they have the attention to launch with a bang. The staying power of a modern, professional arts center in the heart of an Irish working class neighborhood in transition, though, is far less certain.

And in transition is certainly something Mayfair is in.

Mayfair was a new neighborhood in the 1930s, developing on farmland that surrounded older communities like Tacony and Holmesburg. Bounded by Roosevelt Boulevard, Pennypack Park and largely hugging Frankford Avenue, Mayfair, like much of the Northeast, is diversifying today, but still maintains its old working class Irish American roots.

“The Devon cannot exist and thrive feeding on Mayfair alone,” said Mike Lally, the theater’s general manager. “It’s going to start here, but it can’t end here.”

The marketing focus is 15 miles around, he said. They aim to be seen as a Philadelphia, not exclusively a Mayfair or even Northeast Philadelphia theater.

The $6 million cost is a heavy burden, but Lally said revenue from keeping the versatile Devon’s schedule full can help. The Devon can host weddings, community events and, McEnlee mentioned, fundraisers for nonprofits, schools and hero tributes for fallen police officers, firefighters and others. There’s also lease revenue from six storefronts.

For those six storefronts, the CDC has received more than 200 offers, Mayfair CDC Executive Director Brian Patrick King said. But they’ve only accepted two — one of which is Fuse Management, the theater’s production company.

“We want to be selective,” King said. “Because we can be.”

“This model exists across the country,” said Amy Pickering, who is assisting with the theater’s production element and educational outreach. That model includes community interaction, from two-week summer camps, art-gallery space and monthly Saturday reading sessions.

A few hundred people have offered to volunteer as ushers and ticket agents, said Michael Pickering, the Devon’s artistic director and Amy’s husband.

“They’ll even clean the toilets,”  he said. “Anything to be involved and make sure the Devon works.”

But will that neighborhood be enough, if it sustains at all?

“Theater companies have a great fear of leaving Center City because they don’t know if the audiences will follow,” said Karen DiLossi, the director of programs and services for the Theater Alliance of Philadelphia.

There are groups in neighborhoods beyond Center City that are succeeding at performance art though, DiLossi said. Walking Fish Theater is at the forefront of Fishtown’s resurgence, and Chestnut Hill has Stagecrafters Theater. Theatre Exile has opened offices at 13th and Reed streets and has plans for performances at those Bella Vista digs. Act II Playhouse has become a celebrated mainstay in Ambler since opening in 1998, DiLossi said.

“Still, it seems many are afraid to try it,” she said.

“This is professional theater in a community,” said Michael Pickering. “As opposed to just community theater. Our actors are professionals.”

They say their quality performances will put butts in the seats. They better hope so.

“We’re all in,” said King, the CDC director. “It can’t be anything but a win.”

If Murray, the neighborhood boster turned usher, is any example, the neighborhood will do all it can to assure that win.

“Will the Devon survive? I think it will. I certainly hope so. Once the word is out in the community, we can support this. It can pull from across the bridge in Jersey and farther still,” Murray said. “I know I’ll help anyway I can. I can’t see it fail.”

EXTRAS

• “It’s going to be arts, culture and Tony’s pies,” Stephen McEnlee of Fuse Management said of its proximity near the famed tomato pie joint.
• “That’s the only thing the CDC cares about with this project,” Brian Patrick King said. “We’re going to transform this stretch of Frankford Avenue. This block is going to be a model and serve as a gateway to Mayfair.”
• Pickering has had reservations for the March 28 opening for weeks, including one for 24 people from Bucks County.
• Pickerings, 50 and 29, now of Sicklerville, N.J. to work in Atlantic City, came on in January 2008. Met McEnlee in Discovery Church
• “We also have the most expensive curtain track in town,” Mike Lally said of what is dividing concessions from the seated audience in the compact theater.

Joe Mallamaci, owner Tony’s Place

• Three years ago, Tony’s expanded into a third storefront. “We have been waiting three years since for the Devon to open,” he said.
• “This will make people stay in the neighborhood rather than go downtown or to Jersey,” he said.
• Now Tony’s has three rooms. In 1980 bought an adjacent storefront and three years ago, after first hearing about plans to bring the Devon back, bought a third, and now can seat 210 people.
• “We rented the room out, but now we will be able to regularly fill all three stores. We’re trying to employ people again.”
• “My father Dominic and his brother Tony opened this restaurant 57 years ago in 1951. So we have lots of loyal customers. Many of them have left the neighborhood and they still keep coming back. But, they come to eat and they leave,” Mallamaci said. “The Devon will keep them here.”
• “As soon as we heard the Devon was bought by the CDC, we bought another store to accommodate the new customers we knew would come.”
• “Economically, when the economy went bad, we had to close it,” he said of the third room. “But with the buzz and the talk about the Devon, it’s going to make sense again.”
• “I believe in the people over there running it. It’s not just the plays but the graduations, the teacher conferences. I think it’s going to have great long term success.”

By Howie Shapiro and Christopher Wink | Philadelphia Inquirer | March 22, 2009

About 400 people, dressed for a gala, will take their seats Friday evening in what once was a dilapidated Frankford Avenue movie house. Three women in nun’s habits will pop up, administering parochial-school demands: Get rid of the gum! Flip off those cell phones!

The lights will dim, the loopy musical Nunsense will begin – and Northeast Philadelphia will have its first professional live-performance theater, in an area where many people (those in the Northeast included) may not expect to find one.

The opening of the sparkling Devon Theater is an example both of neighborhood tenacity and of a professional Philadelphia theater community whose growth – against the economic odds – seems unstoppable.

“I welcome them to the theater community,” says Margie Salvante, executive director of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. “The theater industry, on a national level, is really focused on Philadelphia as a hot spot right now.”

Excitement has been building in the Mayfair neighborhood where the Devon, on Frankford between Barnett and Stirling Streets, heralds a new level of local entertainment and the gradual revitalization that has taken hold. A call for volunteers to help usher, greet, and take on other duties drew more than 200 responses.

“I’ve seen the Devon at its worst. I want to see the theater now that it’s alive again,” says one of those volunteers, 76-year-old Kathleen Murray, who sometimes goes to the Arden Theatre in Old City or Glenside’s Keswick but relishes the idea of being able to see a show closer to home.

Her orientation was last weekend. “Will I be selling popcorn? Anything!” she says.

Whatever Murray does, she’ll be doing it in a state-of-the-art theater with a new 40-foot stage, and cupholders at each seat – just like at the movies. Its sound design boasts under-the-stage speakers to balance music for the front rows, and necklace transmitters that beam sound directly to the hearing aids of ticketholders who need them.

It even has a skybox of sorts, a roomy 20-seat balcony level for VIPs or rentals, with its own restrooms and catering space.

A local company, Fuse Management, which produces theatrical and special events nationwide (including on the Parkway and at Penn’s Landing), has been in charge of renovation and will mount the productions. Fuse opens the Devon with an agreement with Actors’ Equity, the professional union of theater artists – not generally the case with nascent theater companies. (The nearest theater – Kensington’s Walking Fish, five miles south on Frankford Avenue – pays its actors but is not aligned with Equity.)

“We could actually do it without any unions,” says Stephen McEntee, a Fuse employee instrumental in the Devon’s rescue from termite-riddled, roof-rotting destruction. “But we believe in it because of the talent, and we believe that people should be able to make a living at their profession, the arts or otherwise.”

The Devon, felicitously located near two Mayfair eat-and-drink landmarks – Tony’s Place across the street and Chickie’s & Pete’s to one side – is now owned by Mayfair’s Community Development Corp. (CDC), the neighborhood revitalization group that has a $6 million investment in the theater and the still-to-come surrounding streetscape.

State, federal, city, and private money is funding two-thirds of the project; the rest comes from a loan to the CDC from Beneficial, says Brian Patrick King, its executive director and a Mayfair native.

The theater, he says, will be a production house presenting its own shows, a booking house bringing in others, and a rental on off nights for groups that can use its spaces. The CDC hopes six new retail storefronts on the block, also part of the project, will help pay the Devon’s costs.

The theater even plans to use its own shows to help charities raise money: The charity guarantees the house, then sets fund-raising ticket prices, and the Devon provides all the services, cut-rate.

Like other projects now coming to fruition in a tough economy, the new Devon has roots in a more optimistic time earlier in the decade, when a study showed Mayfair lacked arts and culture in general.

At that time, on the Frankford Avenue corridor that mixed long-standing businesses with newer ones opened by young owners, the Devon was the last old-time movie venue standing, if barely. So five years ago the CDC, looking to create an arts scene – and the nighttime buzz, dining, and shopping that often come with it – bought the Devon for $800,000.

The theater, built in 1946, was among the city’s last single-screen cinemas, eclipsed by the era of multiplexes. In the beginning, its big, twinkly marquee – a landmark re-created and working again – advertised first-run films in what remains a solid, largely Irish Catholic neighborhood (where Nunsense should sell out). But as the business changed, it became a second-run house and then, in the ’70s, declined into porn; neighbors called it “the dirty Devon,” and worse.

One day in 1978, they woke to see a proclamation on the marquee: “No More Sex.” The Devon went back to being a second-run cinema, at 99 cents a ticket until 1985, when (amid some head-shaking) the price went up to $1.

Mike Lally, 29, a Mayfair native and manager of the new Devon, says that when he was a grade schooler, “the last thing I saw here was The Terminator – the original Terminator.”

The theater struggled and shut down, reopened for a few years with classic films in the late ’90s, then closed for good.

“When I walked in, it was like something out of a horror movie,” says Amy Pickering, the new theater’s education director, who will run its summer camp, workshops, and adult programs. That was in early 2008; the building was a dilapidated shell.

She and her husband, Michael – now the Devon’s artistic director – live in Sicklerville, Camden County, and had been traveling the country with a music-comedy dueling-piano show. They came at the behest of Fuse Management, drove around Mayfair, and were intrigued.

Their initial look at the Devon “terrified us a little bit,” Michael says, but they liked the neighborhood. “You could tell there wasn’t a lot of arts access around here, though,” he says, “and we decided it would be great to be part of providing that.”

The Pickerings understand that their shows will draw theatergoers as well as those who have never attended a live performance. To that end, the Devon’s Web site not only lists the usual particulars (ticket prices from $25 to $35, and the like), but also offers guidance on when to applaud.

“People may be a little intimidated,” Michael Pickering says, “and we want this theater to be as accessible as possible to everyone.”

That goes for what’s on offer, too, which returns the Devon to family-theater roots. You want cutting edge? The Devon is not your stage. (The Odd Couple is the just-announced second show.)

Its Web site poses the question: “Is this show appropriate for my kids?” The answer: “At the Devon Theater, we do not produce shows that are ‘for adults only.’ ”

Says Michael Pickering: “It’s a family area. We never want to put a show up with a parental advisory.”

See it here.

By Howie Shapiro and Christopher Wink | Philadelphia Inquirer | March 22, 2009

About 400 people, dressed for a gala, will take their seats Friday evening in what once was a dilapidated Frankford Avenue movie house. Three women in nun’s habits will pop up, administering parochial-school demands: Get rid of the gum! Flip off those cell phones!

The lights will dim, the loopy musical Nunsense will begin – and Northeast Philadelphia will have its first professional live-performance theater, in an area where many people (those in the Northeast included) may not expect to find one.

The opening of the sparkling Devon Theater is an example both of neighborhood tenacity and of a professional Philadelphia theater community whose growth – against the economic odds – seems unstoppable.

“I welcome them to the theater community,” says Margie Salvante, executive director of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. “The theater industry, on a national level, is really focused on Philadelphia as a hot spot right now.”

Excitement has been building in the Mayfair neighborhood where the Devon, on Frankford between Barnett and Stirling Streets, heralds a new level of local entertainment and the gradual revitalization that has taken hold. A call for volunteers to help usher, greet, and take on other duties drew more than 200 responses.

“I’ve seen the Devon at its worst. I want to see the theater now that it’s alive again,” says one of those volunteers, 76-year-old Kathleen Murray, who sometimes goes to the Arden Theatre in Old City or Glenside’s Keswick but relishes the idea of being able to see a show closer to home.

Her orientation was last weekend. “Will I be selling popcorn? Anything!” she says.

Whatever Murray does, she’ll be doing it in a state-of-the-art theater with a new 40-foot stage, and cupholders at each seat – just like at the movies. Its sound design boasts under-the-stage speakers to balance music for the front rows, and necklace transmitters that beam sound directly to the hearing aids of ticketholders who need them.

It even has a skybox of sorts, a roomy 20-seat balcony level for VIPs or rentals, with its own restrooms and catering space.

A local company, Fuse Management, which produces theatrical and special events nationwide (including on the Parkway and at Penn’s Landing), has been in charge of renovation and will mount the productions. Fuse opens the Devon with an agreement with Actors’ Equity, the professional union of theater artists – not generally the case with nascent theater companies. (The nearest theater – Kensington’s Walking Fish, five miles south on Frankford Avenue – pays its actors but is not aligned with Equity.)

“We could actually do it without any unions,” says Stephen McEntee, a Fuse employee instrumental in the Devon’s rescue from termite-riddled, roof-rotting destruction. “But we believe in it because of the talent, and we believe that people should be able to make a living at their profession, the arts or otherwise.”

The Devon, felicitously located near two Mayfair eat-and-drink landmarks – Tony’s Place across the street and Chickie’s & Pete’s to one side – is now owned by Mayfair’s Community Development Corp. (CDC), the neighborhood revitalization group that has a $6 million investment in the theater and the still-to-come surrounding streetscape.

State, federal, city, and private money is funding two-thirds of the project; the rest comes from a loan to the CDC from Beneficial, says Brian Patrick King, its executive director and a Mayfair native.

The theater, he says, will be a production house presenting its own shows, a booking house bringing in others, and a rental on off nights for groups that can use its spaces. The CDC hopes six new retail storefronts on the block, also part of the project, will help pay the Devon’s costs.

The theater even plans to use its own shows to help charities raise money: The charity guarantees the house, then sets fund-raising ticket prices, and the Devon provides all the services, cut-rate.

Like other projects now coming to fruition in a tough economy, the new Devon has roots in a more optimistic time earlier in the decade, when a study showed Mayfair lacked arts and culture in general.

At that time, on the Frankford Avenue corridor that mixed long-standing businesses with newer ones opened by young owners, the Devon was the last old-time movie venue standing, if barely. So five years ago the CDC, looking to create an arts scene – and the nighttime buzz, dining, and shopping that often come with it – bought the Devon for $800,000.

The theater, built in 1946, was among the city’s last single-screen cinemas, eclipsed by the era of multiplexes. In the beginning, its big, twinkly marquee – a landmark re-created and working again – advertised first-run films in what remains a solid, largely Irish Catholic neighborhood (where Nunsense should sell out). But as the business changed, it became a second-run house and then, in the ’70s, declined into porn; neighbors called it “the dirty Devon,” and worse.

One day in 1978, they woke to see a proclamation on the marquee: “No More Sex.” The Devon went back to being a second-run cinema, at 99 cents a ticket until 1985, when (amid some head-shaking) the price went up to $1.

Mike Lally, 29, a Mayfair native and manager of the new Devon, says that when he was a grade schooler, “the last thing I saw here was The Terminator – the original Terminator.”

The theater struggled and shut down, reopened for a few years with classic films in the late ’90s, then closed for good.

“When I walked in, it was like something out of a horror movie,” says Amy Pickering, the new theater’s education director, who will run its summer camp, workshops, and adult programs. That was in early 2008; the building was a dilapidated shell.

She and her husband, Michael – now the Devon’s artistic director – live in Sicklerville, Camden County, and had been traveling the country with a music-comedy dueling-piano show. They came at the behest of Fuse Management, drove around Mayfair, and were intrigued.

Their initial look at the Devon “terrified us a little bit,” Michael says, but they liked the neighborhood. “You could tell there wasn’t a lot of arts access around here, though,” he says, “and we decided it would be great to be part of providing that.”

The Pickerings understand that their shows will draw theatergoers as well as those who have never attended a live performance. To that end, the Devon’s Web site not only lists the usual particulars (ticket prices from $25 to $35, and the like), but also offers guidance on when to applaud.

“People may be a little intimidated,” Michael Pickering says, “and we want this theater to be as accessible as possible to everyone.”

That goes for what’s on offer, too, which returns the Devon to family-theater roots. You want cutting edge? The Devon is not your stage. (The Odd Couple is the just-announced second show.)

Its Web site poses the question: “Is this show appropriate for my kids?” The answer: “At the Devon Theater, we do not produce shows that are ‘for adults only.’ ”

Says Michael Pickering: “It’s a family area. We never want to put a show up with a parental advisory.”

See it here.