Times does Guthrie

[lsanderson]

Enter the Boosters, Bearing Theaters
By JESSE GREEN

IT isn’t every day that a busy portion of Philadelphia’s longest thoroughfare gets shut down, at least not on purpose. But one scorching morning in October, the block of Broad Street from Pine to Lombard, part of a stretch somewhat grandly called the Avenue of the Arts, was taped off, tented, festooned with mums and Mummers. While hundreds of guests sat wilting before the dais, awaiting words from Mayor John F. Street, Gov. Edward G. Rendell and Senator Arlen Specter, a clown on stilts entertained. It was all so quaint and civic, you’d have thought President Taft was coming to town.

But no, the worthies were there to cut the ribbon on the $25 million new home of the Philadelphia Theater Company, which for 25 years had rented a charming but dysfunctional theater a few blocks away. That 1912 building was called Plays and Players; it often seemed that the word audience was omitted deliberately. Sara Garonzik, the company’s producing artistic director, said that many of its 324 seats were broken, that the lobby was too small to shelter patrons, and that the two hideous little bathrooms were barely accessible even to people not in wheelchairs. “That facility was a very trying situation,” Mr. Street recalled. More