The advertising strategy ran the gambit from flyers placed in restaurants and hotels, to radio interviews with Terrell and starring performers to newspaper and magazine articles to parade floats to the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas morning.
The Trentonian
Circa 1975-1976
The Trenton, NJ newspaper, The Trentonian, featured St. John Terrell as George Washington on its TV Log cover (Feb. 22 to Feb. 28). The year appears nowhere in the publication, but is likely 1975 or 1976. The article, written by Ann Rinaldi, details the history of Terrell's re-enactment of General Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas morning.
Time Magazine 1953
"The show opens in a stiff-backed summer camp at Brunswick, Me. (in the original, the scene was Thebes), where a young matron named Eurydice Orpheus is shamelessly cuckolding her husband, a struggling violinist. Her lover: one John Stick, a dull poet. Enter Pluto, in the guise of a soft-drink peddler, who offers the lovers a permanent visit to Hades. Sample of his spiel:"If you would like a long vacation Your reservation I'll quickly fix
You'll simply love my old plantation Way down upon the River Styx!
Music
Straw-Hat Orpheus
Aug. 31, 1953
High on a New Jersey hilltop, overlooking colonial steeples and the Delaware River, music fills the clear air six nights a week. It rises from a huge, floodlit, green and yellow tent, home of Lambertville's Music Circus. Under the big top (where there is room for 1,500) the attractions are Broadway shows (with good second-string casts) such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Call Me Madam, and such vintage operettas as Sweethearts, New Moon and Die Fledermaus. Last week, the Music Circus put on view a frothy revival of Orpheus in the Underworld, by Jacques Offenbach. The new title: To Hell with Orpheus.
Excursion to Hades. Offenbach was a kind of 19th century, Parisian Cole Porter, only better. A superb musical satirist, he could also turn out sentimental waltzes and respectable grand opera, but his specialty was cancan, with its piston-like rhythm and irrepressible gaiety. Orpheus contains some of his best satire and his best cancan tunes. The libretto used at Lambertville (by the late Ring Lardner, with additional lyrics by Edward Eager) tries to modernize the original. The result is stained Varsity-Show humor, but still fun.
The show opens in a stiff-backed summer camp at Brunswick, Me. (in the original, the scene was Thebes), where a young matron named Eurydice Orpheus is shamelessly cuckolding her husband, a struggling violinist. Her lover: one John Stick, a dull poet. Enter Pluto, in the guise of a soft-drink peddler, who offers the lovers a permanent visit to Hades. Sample of his spiel:
If you would like a long vacation Your reservation I'll quickly fix
You'll simply love my old plantation Way down upon the River Styx!
The scene switches to Mount Olympus, where Jupiter is having trouble with his wife Juno. She berates him for his old trick of assuming the shape of a shepherd, a bull or a swan for purposes of dalliance ("Though the girls are squeezable," leers Cupid, "with a swan it isn't feasible"). Jupiter (well sung and acted by Baritone Ralph Herbert) takes Juno and the other gods on a junket to Hades, where they bump into Eurydice; after a few random shots from Cupid's bow, everything ends in a happy shambles. The "go-to-hell" joke is worked pretty hard in the dialogue, but that is offset by Offenbach's tunes. At least two of them. An Old Love Dies and Brunswick Maine, could be hits in any century.
Fire-Eater. The man responsible for this Orpheus, as well as for the circus itself, is St. John Terrell, 36, a Chicago-born showman who pronounces his given name "Sinjun," in the English fashion—not because he is English but, as he explains, because he started off his entertainment career as a fire-eater. After kicking around show business from the age of 16 (carnivals, U.S.O., Broadway and summer theater), he decided five years ago to set up a musical tent show. He picked Lambertville (pop. 4,477) because it was far enough from Broadway to avoid competition and near enough to Bucks County, Pa.'s "genius belt" to have an interested audience. Almost from the start, the tent has drawn big crowds all summer long. Last year's attendance: 160,000; this year's estimate: 175,000.
A man with many irons in the fire, Terrell owns a patent on his tent (it has only two poles), has a scheme for adding smell to the sight & sound of movies and TV, and an interest in three other music circuses around the country. His plans for Orpheus are ambitious: he hopes to open it on Broadway this winter. One of the hazards: another version of the same operetta planned for this season by Showman Billy Rose, who was never a fire-eater but can be counted on to produce a pretty hot Hades, too.
Time Magazine 1959
July, 1959 Time Magazine article on the Music Circus and the success of Tent Theaters.
"After the war, Terrell tried his hand at a twelve-minute film called Smellodrama—an odorously unsuccessful precursor of Mike Todd Jr.'s untried Smell-O-Vision (TIME, Nov. 17). Then in 1949, Terrell opened the nation's first musical arena-theater tent at Lambertville, although 'tent' was one of the few four-letter words you didn't use in the theater. To Broadway's surprise, he cleared $20,000 his first season. This year the Terrell tentacles will scoop in $900,000, net him $100,000.
Show Business
Tenting Tonight
July 6, 1959
High above the Delaware River shore, spotlights glowed dimly through the green-and-orange striped canvas tent. Inside, the audience of 1,500 foot-tapped to some sassy songs. "Bells Are Ringing" jangled tunefully onstage, and for the Lambertville, N.J. Music Circus, the box office kept ringing up boffo business.
Across the land, summer stock plunged hopefully toward a bull market, with its youngest, sprightliest offshoot clearly leading the way—musicals under canvas. By season's end, almost 5,000,000 Americans will have bought $12 million worth of tickets to the nation's 29 tent theaters. Few of the big-top producers will do better than a sometime carnival fire-eater named St. John (rhymes with Injun) Terrell, 42, who celebrates Christmas by donning colonial garb and boating the Delaware in memory of George Washington's 1776 Trenton victory. A mere Mike Toddler among impresarios when he first hoisted his Lambertville tent in 1949, Terrell now owns or has a hand in four more (at Brandywine, Pa., Neptune, N.J., Rosecroft, Md., Rye, N.Y.), and clearly ranks as a Belasco of Straw Hat.
All-American Boy. Chicago-born—as George Clinton Eccles—Terrell was raised by a grandmother (his parents had separated) who gave him his grandfather's name. Struck by theater magic at Chicago's Francis Parker School (recalls Fellow Student Celeste Holm: "He always seemed to be understudying John Barrymore"), he prepped vaguely for his mother's perfume business at Columbia University, spent more time on Broadway than Morningside Heights. Even before college he was radio's first Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (salary: $125); as a sophomore he wangled a part in Maxwell Anderson's "Winterset."
After leaving Columbia, Terrell wintered in perfume, summered in stock, with friends' money opened the famed Bucks County (Pa.) Playhouse in 1939. During World War II he piloted transport planes until injured in a crash, then managed U.S.O. troupes through the South Pacific. In Manila once, he found no theater available, asked to use a tent. The Army said no; but the idea lingered.
After the war, Terrell tried his hand at a twelve-minute film called Smellodrama—an odorously unsuccessful precursor of Mike Todd Jr.'s untried Smell-O-Vision (TIME, Nov. 17). Then in 1949, Terrell opened the nation's first musical arena-theater tent at Lambertville, although 'tent' was one of the few four-letter words you didn't use in the theater. To Broadway's surprise, he cleared $20,000 his first season. This year the Terrell tentacles will scoop in $900,000, net him $100,000.
Half Impresario, Half Human. With that kind of change, Terrell loafs through the off season in an 18-room, 220-year-old mansion five miles from Lambertville, cruises about in a 1940 Rolls-Royce. Once the tents go up, Terrell haunts tryouts in blue jeans and Texas hat, exhausts a 250-man staff. "Half the time he's the impresario," says a friend. "The rest of the time he's human."
Relying on easy-to-take prices ($2.75 average), Broadway hit musicals and a casual, carnival atmosphere, Terrell plans to open two more Music Circuses next summer, argues that the theater's future profits will crop up far off Broadway, in suburbs rather than cities. Says he, with prophetic zeal: "In ten years there won't be a top legitimate theater in any U.S. city, except ten or twelve in New York. But the big shopping centers—in places like Flint, Akron, Fond du Lac—will all have top legit theaters."
Lambertville Centennial Parade Float
Music Circus float believed to have appeared in the 1949 Lambertville Centennial Parade.
Quite an undertaking considering the music Circus opened in July, 1949. One would think that Terrell had enough on his plate than to also orchestrate a parade float. But he was a master at publicity.
Press Clippings
Source: Clipping provided by Ken Scheetz.
Barbara L. Wilson's Column Philadelphia Inquirer, May 9, 1969
Barbara Wilson, an Entertainment Writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer had a unique way of asking Mr. Terrell to contact her—she put a missing person notice in her column. Apparently the rumors were flying.
In fact, according to our records, the Music Circus' last season was the Summer of 1969. We can find records of only two shows for that season: "Jewel Box Revue" August 18 thru August 23, 1969 and "Follies Burlesque" September 1 thru September 7, 1969.
1958 Press Clippings - Music Circus Productions
Courtesy: Ed Mottershead. Publications: Unknown
Publication: Unknown
Source: Ed Mottershead
Publication: Unknown
Source: Ed Mottershead
Publication: Unknown
Source: Ed Mottershead
Publication: Unknown
Source: Ed Mottershead
1956 TV Guide
Terrell's press people were able to get a 3/4 page picture of Joyce Randolph rehearsing for the lead role in "Plain and Fancy" at St. John Terrell's Music Circus in Lambertville, NJ. in the September 8, 1956 issue of TV Guide (Elvis cover). This issue was reprinted in 2002 by the TV Guide Group.