Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of occasional articles on the Cape Playhouse as the venerable local institution approaches its 100th birthday in 2027. “Basil Rathbone and the Birth of the Cape Playhouse” appeared in April 2023 in the Dennis Historical Society’s DHS Digital Digest.
By Kevin N. Keegan
Member, Dennis Historical Society Board of Directors
Simply put, there would be no Cape Playhouse—no acclaimed longest-running summer theatre in America and no focal point of Dennis Village—without Raymond Wheatley Moore.
Moore was a Baltimore native who enrolled at Johns Hopkins University but later earned his degree from Stanford University, where he subsequently took graduate courses in botany and served as a teaching assistant in the Biology Department. He originally came across the country to Provincetown in his mid-to-late 20s to paint landscapes but instead joined forces with friend Harold Winston there in the summer of 1926 to run the Winston-Moore Playhouse, with Winston as director and Moore as producer.
According to a history of the Cape Playhouse compiled by Margaret Tracy, Anne LeClaire, and Lamont Smith and published for its 50th anniversary season in 1976, Moore had a vision after his year in Provincetown of “a theatre of his own, a smart, sophisticated summer theatre which would serve up the best of Broadway as a vehicle for the top stars. He reasoned that summer theatre-goers would be attracted by the big-name stars, and such stars would be interested in getting away from Broadway for the summer provided that they could appear at a professional, legitimate theatre for a good week’s pay.” In her landmark 1996 history of Dennis, Cape Cod, Nancy Thacher Reid reports that Moore was urged by Margaret Howes Richardson, who owned and managed the tea room and inn overlooking Scargo Lake called The Sign of the Motorcar, to locate his theatre in Dennis Village.
In pursuit of that dream, Moore originally bought 3.5 acres from Barnabus C. Hall off what was once called Kings Highway—centrally located on Cape Cod, importantly—for $1200 and later found the empty 1790 (sometimes cited as 1810 or 1840) Nobscusset Meeting House, bought it from Charles Smith Goodspeed for $200, and moved it to its present location, then a small pasture. The noted architect and scenic designer Cleon Throckmorton was hired to convert the former church into a theatre, with local builder Isaiah Grafton Howes overseeing construction. A major addition was added, as Marcia Monbleau wrote in her 2001 history of The Cape Playhouse, to provide “space for a fly gallery, stage and proscenium.” And as Monbleau further noted, “The dark oak pews were retained for orchestra seats, and the church’s hand-hewn beams, joined by wooden pegs, were not improved upon” by Throckmorton.
“The Cape Playhouse hopes to stand by the best in the field of art,” Moore, then approaching just 30 years old, wrote in 1927, “and to establish something infinitely more important than a mere commercial theatre. It hopes to be sincere in its efforts, sane in its management and membership. It hopes to offer the public something of definite value and to receive in return the public’s interest and its financial support at the box office.” Early funding of the new theatre was almost entirely based on advanced season tickets sold to native Cape Codders and summer residents.
Monbleau additionally observed in her 2001 history that “Raymond Moore proved to have a remarkable talent for tempting subscribers, wooing actors, and convincing the town that the new theatre would contribute to its well-being. He meant what he said, everyone believed him, and his vision soared.” For Opening Night on July 4, 1927, theatre-goers came from New York, Boston, Baltimore, and all over Cape Cod for the sold-out performance of Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman, starring Broadway headliners Basil Rathbone and Violet Kemble Cooper. The nine-show first season continued with Peter Ibbetson (starring Rathbone), The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (starring Cooper), Outward Bound (starring Rathbone), Meet the Wife (starring Janet Beecher), Man of Destiny (starring Michael Stranger), Cradle Snatchers (starring Beecher), Solomon’s Glory (starring Dwight Frye), and The Duchess Decides (starring Beecher).
With 98% of his first-year subscribers renewing for 1928, Moore followed that wildly successful 1927 season with a terrific slate of shows that included Peggy Wood starring in The Bride and Candida, the still-relatively-unknown Robert Montgomery headlining in The Silver Cord and Captain Applejack, and the first-ever professional stage appearances for Henry Fonda (in The Barker) and Cape-Playhouse-usherette-turned-actress Bette Davis (in a small role in Mr. Pim Passes By). Opening night for each new show became a major social event, and by late 1929, the campus was expanded to 27 arces after Moore purchased three additional parcels, one each from Annie F. Denninston, Benjamin F. Hall, and Francis T. Hall.
Over the next dozen years, Moore kept his promise to bring A-listers and rising stars of the professional stage to Dennis Village—hence the apt description coined in The New York Times that the Cape Playhouse was the “Place Where Broadway Goes to Summer”—including Dame Judith Anderson, Leo J. Carroll, Ethel Barrymore, Jane Cowl, Imogene Coca, Uta Hagen, Kitty Carlisle, Humphrey Bogart, Ruth Gordon, Martha Scott, Doris Day, and Gertrude Lawrence, to name a few.
Davis returned to the Playhouse in 1929—now as a leading lady at age 21—in The Patsy, Just Suppose, Grumpy, The Dover Road, and You Never Can Tell, to be followed with her 1930 starring role in Broken Dishes before heading to Hollywood to begin her legendary film career. Margaret Hamilton—later renowned for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz—made her professional debut on the Playhouse stage in Cape Cod Follies in 1929.
Otto Preminger made his own bit of Cape Cod theatrical history when he directed headliners Glenda Farrell and Douglass Montgomery in the Playhouse production of Brief Moment in the late 1930s. And in one of the great masterstrokes of his tenure, Moore—by then assisted by Richard Aldrich—signed Thornton Wilder himself in 1939 to portray the Stage Manager in the Playhouse production of Our Town just a year after Wilder’s play had captured the hearts of Broadway audiences and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Moore’s vision of expanding the grounds included building the scene shop behind the Playhouse in 1929 and overseeing the construction in 1930 of the nearby Cape Cinema, designed by noted New York architect Alfred Easton Poor. The campus grew to 30 acres—including actors’ cottages—and Moore’s love of botany and horticulture led him to spend huge sums on dazzling Playhouse gardens that included, according to that 1976 retrospective, at one point “9000 petunias, hundreds of rare iris, delphinium, roses and other flowers. The gardens also contained an aviary with exotic birds, a goldfish pond, a rustic bridge, and a tea house.” A Playhouse playbill from 1936 urged visitors to “see the new collection of PARAKEETS in the gardens to the right of the Cinema.”
A July 9, 1937, Yarmouth Register article reported “Veronicas, climbing roses, delphiniums, sweet pea, phlox, and shasta daisies are in bloom this week in the gardens of Raymond Moore’s Cape Playhouse. The gardens, which cover every inch of the thirty acres not devoted to the Playhouse, Cinema, restaurant, or other buildings, are one of the showplaces of the peninsula and are attracting a steady stream of visitors.” Moore also had memorable landscapes installed at his home at 57 Hope Lane—a short walk from the Playhouse—and he invited theater-goers to visit his private property after shows to view the plantings under “electric illumination” until 11:30 each evening.
That 1976 retrospective also details that Moore scheduled “concerts, recitals, poetry readings and featured puppet and magic shows for youngsters weekly. He started an apprentice program for aspiring actors, promoted a three-day drama festival, and initiated a Junior Playhouse.” The Hyannis Patriot in 1929 reported that Moore even hired a Russian Balalaika Orchestra to play at intermission and to provide incidental music during a show when needed.
All of which brings us to widowed socialite Edna Bradley Tweedy (seen here in a black-and-white photograph of her portrait by Philip de Laszlo), who had earlier inherited $10,000,000 from her Wisconsin lumber-baron father and uncles and split time between her substantial home on 5th Avenue in New York City and her summer home in Wianno on Cape Cod. Tweedy was a key benefactor of Moore’s as an early financial supporter of the Cape Playhouse, as a driving force behind the Cape Cinema—and its astonishing Rockwell Kent vaulted-ceiling mural—and as a generous patron in creating the lush grounds of the campus.
She was also later Moore’s wife, having secretly married a man nearly 30 years her junior the year before her death in 1936. Indeed, according to a 1983 Register article, Tweedy’s executors noted that in the seven years prior to her passing—so during the worst years of the Great Depression—she had given Moore an astonishing $620,000 to bankroll his dream of an arts mecca in Dennis. Moore had signed a pre-nuptial agreement before his 17-month marriage to Tweedy, so he received little in her will—he was left a trust fund that generated $5000 annually, with the bulk of Tweedy’s fortune instead going to her three daughters—though Moore was awarded two payments totaling just over $100,000 in March 1937 to forgo the trust-fund annuity in an out-of-court settlement after he sued Tweedy’s estate.
And then, abruptly, it all ended for Moore.
The headline in The New York Times for March 10, 1940, captured the essence of the man, who had died suddenly the day before at age 42 of a cerebral hemorrhage in his apartment at the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street in Manhattan: “RAYMOND MOORE, PRODUCER, IS DEAD; Pioneer in Summer Theatres was Owner and a Founder of Cape Playhouse in Dennis; GAVE BETTE DAVIS START….”
Moore left much of his estate—valued the year he died at $33,803, most of it in his Dennis properties—to create a Raymond Moore Foundation that would guarantee that the Cape Playhouse, the Cape Cinema and the grounds would continue to educate and benefit the public by fostering “music, drama, horticulture, and fine arts.” The foundation was finally created in 1948 and helped oversee the Playhouse until 2006, when the day-to-day operations of the heralded summer stock theatre and the ownership of almost all of the campus structures—the Playhouse itself, the Cape Cinema, the scene shop, the props barn, the Nickerson Studio, the box office, the gazebo, and the administration building—were all transferred to the non-profit Cape Cod Center for the Arts. Today, the Raymond Moore Foundation still owns the land comprising most of the original campus—much of it leased to the CCCA for 99 years beginning back in 2006—but is uninvolved in the running of the Cape Playhouse or the CCCA.
