Pam Sommerfield’s unique theatrical life

In due course Pam and her American husband, Bill, a book publishing executive, assembled a group of local Britons — of whom there are more in Philadelphia than you might guess — into The Royal Pickwickians, a musical comedy troupe dedicated to the refreshing proposition that Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens are still very much alive. At first the Pickwickians performed mostly for private parties, but beginning in the early ’80s, for one weekend each September they took over one of Center City’s quainter theaters — the Plays and Players, say, or Penn’s Mask and Wig Club — to recreate a “Victorian Music Hall,” complete with hecklers in the audience, a chairman to insult the hecklers (“Mr. Gladstone, I see you’ve brought your bag with you”), and a light supper afterward where audience and performers shared in mutual good fellowship.

Tuning her piano

In our age of legal Internet pornography, a Victorian show might seem like pretty tame stuff, but the opposite was true. Precisely because Victorian society was so repressive, Victorian performers developed a unique knack for the double entrendre. The result was an almost ingenious ability to make the most innocent remark (like “If you will peek in my gazebo”) sound salacious.

In one number, the Welsh-born Philadelphian Mary Russell sang, “Why am I always a bridesmaid, never a blushing bride?” with a chorus about “ding-dong wedding bells,” accompanied by an up-and-down ringing motion executed with Mary’s right hand. When she invited the audience to join in the chorus, she commanded, “I want to see all your ding-dongs” — and then, gesturing to a random male in the audience — “especially yours.”

But the brightest talent in this procession of outlandish soloists was Pam Sommerfield herself, who even well into her 60s possessed an uncanny ability to impersonate a precocious 17-year-old music student anticipating the daily thrill of getting her piano tuned (“My boyfriend also wants to tune my piano, but the tuner has a much longer repertoire”); or an eight-year-old brat abusing her pet cat because “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow”; or an adolescent singing, “Oh, I’ve Lost It,” without ever explaining what “it” was (beyond implying that a gentleman in the audience knew the answer); or a would-be Brünnhilde, dressed in Wagnerian helmet and breastplate while performing “I Want to Sing in Opera.”

Meet Betsy Ross

These evenings were no mere frivolous entertainments. If anyone in the audience cared to notice, they were carefully researched sociological journeys into a bygone age. Satirical songs like “They’re Moving Father’s Grave to Build a Sewer” or “Did Your First Wife Ever Do That?” reflected genuine social issues in Victorian England — in this case, respectively, the advance of industrialization and the high mortality rate among young wives.

Eventually the Sommerfields branched out into providing historical plays, programs, and actor/interpreters for American historical figures like William Penn, Ben Franklin, and Betsy Ross. As serendipity would have it, about this time the fledgling National Constitution Center — then a concept without a building — was searching for programming that would legitimize the Center’s quest for a home on Independence Mall. The Sommerfields’ troupe, soon rechristened the American Historical Theatre, proved a perfect fit.

Over the next quarter-century, this troupe developed a theatrical niche that hadn’t previously existed. Its performers weren’t merely actors reading someone else’s scripts; they were self-taught scholars who researched their characters so thoroughly that they became those characters in conversation with school classes or tourists on the streets of Society Hill. Under the Sommerfields' parental guidance, aspiring actors broke in as minor historical characters (Elbridge Gerry, say, or James Wilson) and subsequently worked their way up to Abigail Adams, James Madison, or General Sir William Howe. (Bill Sommerfield, the troupe’s perpetual George Washington, was chosen by Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1989 to recreate Washington’s inaugural ride from Mount Vernon to New York to be sworn in as America’s first president in 1789.) Eventually the troupe broke out of its Colonial box to embrace historical characters stretching from Galileo to Sojourner Truth to Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” said Teddy Roosevelt. Pam Sommerfield, who died July 8 at the age of 83, and Bill (who died five years ago at 79) made a life in the theater by following Teddy’s advice. For their particular kind of theater, it didn’t hurt that they found themselves in Philadelphia.