Tag: philadelphia

Article · News

Philadelphia Freedom

Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment

The Digital Collection of Oscar Wilde
Documents at The Philadelphia Free Library

Readers will recall my visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair a couple of years ago where I was offered a very rare Oscar Wilde document.

It was a typescript of the (originally) unpublished portions of Wilde’s passive-aggressive prison masterpiece De Profundis.

It was prepared by Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, for use in the 1913 trial when Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar’s lover Bosie) sued a young Arthur Ransome for having the temerity to imply that a person he didn’t name just might have had a hand in Wilde’s downfall.

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News · Review

“Earnest in Town”

Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments
Alanna J. Smith, Daniel Fredrick, Lauren Sowa, Mary Martello and Jake Blouch. Photo by Mark Garvin.
Alanna J. Smith, Daniel Fredrick, Lauren Sowa, Mary Martello and Jake Blouch. Photo by Mark Garvin
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia

With its marble columns and lobby posters of productions past, the Walnut Street Theatre is a venerable venue that claims, dubiously, that Jefferson and Lafayette attending its opening night performance?1

Within the neoclassical Federal shell of the Walnut can often be found the kernel of fine scenic design, tasteful costumes, and knowledgeable subscribers. One imagines, therefore, that a sledgehammer would not be utilized in revealing itself. Unfortunately, such had been the case on my recent visits to witness the repertory’s assaults on Agatha Christie and Noel Coward. 

So it was more with a sense of duty and dread, than enthusiasm, that my band of Philadelphia Wildeans revisited the scene of those crimes to see The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Would the Wilde play be similarly executed?

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Article

Salomé

Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments
Gustave Moreau’s 1876 Salomé dansant devant Hérode (Salome dancing before Herod) descriptions of which in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature) had stimulated Wilde’s interest in the subject.
The Only Known Typescript of Wilde’s FRENCH Salome

I have somewhat of a preoccupation with the use of primary sources, and sources don’t come any more primary than the recent discoveries of Wildeana that were made at the Free Library of Philadelphia prior to the Oscar Wilde season early this year.

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Announcement · News

Mickle Street: Preview

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

Next up in Philadelphia’s Oscar Wilde season is Mickle Street

Mickle Street is a new play about the famous meeting in 1882 between Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman.

It is called Mickle Street because that the adress of former Whitman’s former home in Camden, New Jersey, now a house museum. As it happens, the two encounters between Wilde and Whitman took place not in Mickle Street, but at the home of Walt’s brother, George, in nearby Stevens Street, two years before Whitman purchased the Mickle Street property—the only house he ever owned.

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Announcement

A Wilde Winter in Philadelphia

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

Philadelphia is the place for Wildeans this Winter

A catalyst and centerpiece of current Oscar Wilde activity is the Morrison/Cox opera Oscar which had its world premiere in Santa Fe, NM, last year to generally favorable reviews of its singers, orchestra, conductor Evan Rogister, and overall production values. 

Critics can look forward to an updated libretto for the East Coast premiere.

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