[1] Adolf Philipp was born in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
His early play, The Poor Nobleman, ran for a thousand nights in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and was performed in major cities throughout the German Empire.
He emigrated to the United States in 1889 and became an American citizen on June 2, 1898.
After founding the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Theater in Berlin, which enjoyed only limited success from 1904 to 1907, he cultivated a more receptive audience in New York City for his string of musical comedies and plays from 1907 to 1934, and in 1912 he opened the Adolf Philipp Theatre in Manhattan on East Fifty-Seventh Street.
[2][3][4] Adolf Philipp's frequent business partner was his brother, Paul Philipp, a Broadway producer and father of Robert Philipp, the noted American Impressionist painter, who in his earlier years performed on stage in Europe in Adolf's productions.