EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a series of three Dennis Historical Society DHS Digital Digest articles on The Cape Playhouse as the iconic and nationally-known theatre approaches its 100th anniversary in 2027.
by K. Newell Keegan
Member, Dennis Historical Society Board of Directors
In the mid-1920s, Raymond Moore had a vision for The Cape Playhouse: to create a mecca for summer theatregoers out of nothing on land off of what was then called King’s Highway in Dennis. That narrative, important and intriguing and improbable as it was, will be reported in detail in a future DHS Digital Digest article.
Because this is the story of Basil Rathbone—debonair star of the stage and later the Hollywood screen—whose commitment to the inaugural season of The Cape Playhouse in 1927 would put the village of Dennis and its new way-way-way off-Broadway stage at the center of the regional acting universe and set the groundwork for The Playhouse to become, as The Barnstable Patriot declared in 1949, “America’s most famous summer theatre.”
Rathbone was born to British parents in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1892 and returned with them to the United Kingdom at age 3. By the second decade of the 20th century, he had begun his rise to prominence as an actor on the English stage, especially in a variety of Shakespearean roles.
As World War I broke out, however, Rathbone tabled his acting career and joined the British army in 1915 as a private in the London Scottish Regiment, in which he would serve with future film stars Claude Rains and Ronald Colman. In early 1916, Rathbone was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in a battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment as an intelligence officer and later rose to the rank of Captain. His bravery in volunteering for daylight reconnaissance missions against German army positions on the Western Front would earn him the Military Cross in September 1918 for “conspicuous daring and resource on patrol.” During his four-year enlistment, Rathbone twice won the British Army’s fencing championship.
And then it was back to the stage—first in England and then across the pond in America—as Rathbone played the male lead in Romeo and Juliet with the New Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon and won the title role in Peter Ibbetson at the Savoy Theatre in London. At the Cort Theatre in New York in 1923, Rathbone starred opposite Eva Le Gallienne in The Swan in a performance that made him a star on Broadway and led him to tour the United States in 1925.
So it was a pretty big deal for Raymond Moore to entice the up-and-coming Rathbone and the Broadway actress Violet Kemble Cooper as headliners for The Guardsman—Ferenc (Franz) Molnar’s stageplay about a husband-and-wife acting team—as the curtain went up at The Cape Playhouse for the first time on Monday evening, July 4, 1927. Fireworks could be heard in the distance, and some of the heavy rain outside found its way through the imperfect roof and into the cobbled-together theatre—legend has it that some in the audience actually opened umbrellas in the pews to ward off the incessant interior drizzle—but the show went on … and The Cape Playhouse was an immediate success. Indeed, an article in The Yarmouth Register two days later reported that “the premiere performance was witnessed by a notable audience who showed great appreciation. The opening night foreshadows a brilliant season as a triumph for Mr. Moore in the fruition of his well-laid plans.”
Percy Williams, who was part of the stage crew that first night, looked back more than two decades later in a Barnstable Patriot article and described how Rathbone, “a distinguished young English actor just making a name for himself in this country, helped lash the set into place before he dressed for his entrance, and his lovely wife Ouida Bergere planned and supervised the properties and stage arrangements.” Williams recalled Rathbone as “a swell guy… cheerful and willing to lend a hand,” noting there were times when Rathbone would pick up a hammer and saw and “help a stagehand with scenery” or “seeing something that needed to be moved, add his fine muscles to the cause.”
In reminiscing further about The Cape Playhouse’s first “hopeful night” in 1927, Williams characterized it as an evening “when the most fashionable audience ever gathered on Cape Cod welcomed the opening of a venture unequalled in the history of American theatre. While the other summer enterprises throughout the resort regions of the nation already had achieved much that was worthwhile in the world of theatre, none had undertaken such an ambitious program as that established by Raymond Moore…. To have been even a very little part of the beginning of the venture, I count as one of the greater privileges of my life.”
And here is more about that magical opening night, again through Williams’s memory. “Of all the thrilling colorful happenings of that first season,” Williams wrote, “I recall most vividly the eternal minutes before the curtain went up on the initial performance of The Guardsman. Some of us backstage were merely apprentices-of-all-trades, trying to be helpful but probably underfoot as the big moment neared. I remember we kept peeking from behind the curtain, appraising an audience that fairly glittered. It seemed more like an opera opening than that of a summer theater.”
“Just before the curtain rose, there was a hush and the theater was as still as an empty cathedral,” remembered Williams. “Basil Rathbone, straight as a soldier, was standing in the wings, his handsome head raised reverently, it seemed. Blonde Violet Kemble Cooper, his lovely leading lady, stood classically statuesque during that anxious but seemingly hallowed moment. Only the distant splutter of fireworks broke the silence for it was Fourth of July night. A ‘curtain-up’ signal by stage manager Sammy Seldon released the unbearable tension and the play was on. The welcoming applause was long and thunderous. Basil didn’t try to hide a quick, happy smile. Miss Cooper stopped worrying about the mosquito that had been buzzing in front of her face.”
Rathbone and Cooper remained at The Cape Playhouse into August that year and starred in three more week-long productions, all well received: Peter Ibbetson (as Rathbone reprised the title role he had created years earlier for the London stage), The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, and Outward Bound. A July 16 Register article on Peter Ibbetson reported that “the audience showed its full appreciation of the play and players and recalled them several times.”
For The Playhouse’s 23rd season in June 1949, Rathbone returned to Dennis for the first time since that summer decades earlier to headline The Heiress—a stage adaptation based loosely on Henry James’s novel Washington Square—for which Rathbone had won the 1948 Tony Award on Broadway for Best Actor and had subsequently taken the show on national tour.
By the late 1940s, of course, Rathbone was an internationally famous Hollywood actor whose screen credits included Oscar-nominated Best Supporting Actor roles in Romeo and Juliet (as Tybalt in 1936) and in If I Were King (as Louis XI in 1938), as well as leading roles as Sherlock Holmes in 14 popular feature films (between 1939 and 1946), including The Hound of the Baskervilles. According to Hollywood legend and the website IMDb.com, Rathbone had been Margaret Mitchell’s choice to play Rhett Butler—a role that went instead to Clark Gable—in the 1939 film adaptation of Mitchell’s bestselling novel Gone with the Wind.
Rathbone graced The Cape Playhouse stage one last time in 1957—ten years before his passing—playing to packed audiences in Witness for the Prosecution, Agatha Christie’s 1953 adaption of her own 1925 short story, “Traitor’s Hands.”
So as the footlights fade and the curtain starts to close on this story of Basil Rathbone and the birth of The Cape Playhouse—now the oldest continuously operating summer theatre in America—here again is first-night crew member Percy Williams, stepping from wing to center stage for some final thoughts on that first performance: “The audience reception that night was as deeply gratifying to the crew back stage as to the actors on it. But in all the excitement and glamor of the grand opening, none of us, unless it was Ray Moore himself … dared dream that, here in this converted 1790 meeting house, was being launched the most famous summer theatre in America.”
And if you have a few moments, you will surely enjoy leafing through this 32-page digital copy … of the very first Cape Playhouse program: https://archive.org/details/playbillforguard01moln
