Category: Radio Plays

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Digest, Please!

Well, it’s a different kind of animal. The kind that digests in the very instance of ingestion. Webjournalism, I mean. It matters little whether or not you write for a living, as long as you write what you are living while you are living it, while you experience or witness what is being stored and storied. My digestive system operates far less efficiently, I’m afraid, which is why I frequently end up with a digest of my day-to-day.

It is not that I regurgitate the past. I very much live in the moment, a skill (or nearsightedness) I developed living the United States, the empire of “now.” And yet, by the time I manage to keep up with them, those moments have lost their momentum. They are memories the writing down of which is the reheating of yesterday’s repasts. Instead of journalizing my journey as it happens, I delay the act of relaying it by sharing recollections edited, according to a Wordsworthian scheme of spontaneity, in motionless and remote tranquility.

This is what I feel compelled to do now—catching up with myself. After all, taking bites out of the Big Apple for a month left me with plenty to digest, even if some of pieces of my intake turned out to be as unpalatable as the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening or as bland as the Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a sentimental exchange starring the ill-served if indefatigable Angela Lansbury.

Only a few days ago I spent an afternoon at Coney Island, walking past Nathan’s (not eating the hot dogs that once got me terribly sick) and riding the old Cyclone—whose twists and curves once caused me to break the bones of my best friend sitting beside me. Today, I am cleaning up after a sick dog that swallowed a bone far too large to be digested, hoping he will be spared an operation, hoping I am going to be spared something akin to “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones” (Norman Corwin’s radio play about a boy determined to retrieve his dead dog from “Curgatory”).

It is retrospection that saves me from exposing myself at my most vulnerable—in the in-between of everyday living. It is life tidied up and tied up neatly. It is loose ends woven into a security blanket. Digest, please!

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Murder in the Backroom; or, No Place for a Lady

Well, they are still at it. Slamming doors, screaming bloody murder, getting into fisticuffs—all in a perfectly orderly manner, standing upright, their eyes focused on the sheets of paper in their hands. The W-WOW! players, I mean, who meet on the first Saturday of each month, from September to June, to step into the “broadcasting” studio in the (pictured) backroom of the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in downtown Manhattan. 

Last night, for their final performance before going on summer hiatus, the W-WOW! troupe recreated episodes from Broadway Is My Beat (“Francesca Brown,” originally broadcast on 2 June 1951) and Richard Diamond, Private Detective (“The Carnival Case,” from 16 August 1950). Capably delivering their lines, the two leading men—Steven Viola as Danny Clover in Broadway Is My Beat and Michael H. Johnson as Richard Diamond—were more than amply supported by the four ladies of the fancifully titled Cranston & Spade Theatre Company. Indeed, they were upstaged by them, and that despite the fact that the titular character of the evening’s first offering was dead before the action got under way.

Sheila York brought sex appeal to the role of a carnival gypsy who beckons Diamond into “the inner sanctum,” which gives the leading man a chance to quip: “Haven’t I heard you on the radio?” As a former DJ, the woman who played her sure has experience in broadcasting. And aside from being a competent voice artist, York is also a published novelist who draws inspiration from the medium in which she worked. Her latest thriller, A Good Knife’s Work, takes readers inside the business of radio drama in the 1940s—with a female detective as a guide.

Voice-over artist and teacher Karla Hendrick has a voice most likely to succeed in that business, standing out even in parts no larger than that of a gum-chewing waitress cracking wise with the gumshoe. In charge of musical transcription and accompaniment was Heather Edwards, while DeLisa M. White handled the sound effects, delivering blows and popping balloons according to the cues in the script.

For now, the ladies of W-WOW! are adjuncts to the dramas presented by the players, deliver commercials, play sidekicks, sirens, or servants. Sure, Diamond’s girlfriend Helen knows how to handle a gun (as is demonstrated in one of the script’s sly takes on traditional gender roles); but maybe the company should take on some of the radio thrillers featured in Jack French’s Private Eyelashes and revive that rare breed of crime-solving radio heroines. So, how about it, Messrs. Cranston & Spade?

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Alexander Technique: A Matter of Queer Posture

Well, it’s been a few decades since my first (and only) toga party. Last night, I felt as if I were crashing one. A friend of mine took me to a way-off Broadway production of a play called A Kiss from Alexander (book and lyrics by Stephan de Ghelder; music by Brad Simmons). Billed as a “musical fantasy,” it is essentially a backstage stabbing farce—say, All About Abs—wrapped in romance and sentiment. Its tone is considerably less even than the spray tan on the cast’s collective hide.

Borrowing from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Down to Earth, which it references, this gay Band Wagon rolls along merrily enough, confident in attracting an audience steeped in Hollywood myth, in Broadway lore as well as lingo. “Alexander technique,” for instance, which served as a pun in the play, is a way of learning how to rid the body of tension. Alternative culture has been doing just that by leaning on traditions that produce anxieties, irreverence being the release.

Art not quite sure of its standing tends to be self-conscious. Witnessing the return of Alexander the Great in his mission to sabotage a bawdy, low-fidelity account of his private life (in a production called “Alexander Was Great!”), I was reminded of Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “A Descent of the Gods.” In it, the god of Trivia recalls how Venus, Mars, and Apollo visited Earth, and how they were embraced and degraded by the media, the least respected and most prominent of which being the one in which poet-journalist Corwin operated.

By now, the god of Trivia has been knocked off his throne by the god of Camp. And while I am not a worshipper of either, it is difficult to deny the force of the latter.

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“Yankee Doodle went to town” . . . and That Is Where You’ll Find Him

Well, call me a “dirty rat,” but I’ve never paid much attention to this memorial on East 91 Street (or “James Cagney Place,” to be precise), a mere two blocks from where I used to live. The everyday renders much what surrounds us invisible; so, I’m going to make some noise for the old “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the tribute to whom I now see with eyes accustomed to the green hills of Wales. Say, just how Welsh is the old New Yorker? Taking advantage of the wireless network I am gleefully tapping, I reencountered the aforementioned Cagney in an adaptation of Night Must Fall by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams (previously discussed here). On American radio, the role of Danny, the charming psychopath, was most frequently played by Robert Montgomery, who also starred in the 1937 screen version. As it turns out, Cagney does not sound unlike Montgomery, which is to say, rather Irish than, as Williams prescribed it, “more Welsh than anything else.”

Among the other radio-related finds of the day were fine copies of Earle McGill’s Radio Directing (1940) and Harrison B. Summer’s Thirty-Year History of Radio Programs, 1926-1956 (1971), the latter of which I consulted so frequently while writing my doctoral study on old-time radio. Both volumes sat on the shelves of the Strand bookstore on 828 Broadway, which is well worth a visit for anyone who enjoys browsing for unusual books. A few blocks away, I found a copy of Once Upon a Time (for a mere $4.99); I have long wanted to catch up with this comedy. After all, it is based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy (“My Client, Curley” (previously discussed here).

Meanwhile, night is falling on Manhattan. Time to leave the old wireless alone and go out for a drink . . .

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I’ll Talk Manhattan

Well . . . eventually. As you may have gathered from the snapshot (in case you are among the multitude not inclined to catch up with my keepings-up), I am back in the town I called home for about fifteen years of my life, the town to which I owe more than my academic education, the town that owes me my youth but, I am glad to say, is welcome to it. It sure feels great to be back; to hear the sirens in the avenues, to smell the dusty streets, to see what’s being torn down, remodelled, or in a familiar if progressive state of disrepair. How nice it is to run into old neighbors and catch up on months of gossip, of which the apartment building in which I am staying is full, considering that another story is being added to it and its frame is suffering along with the old tenants who are being expected to put up with dirt, noise, and noticeable structural damage.

It is a treat to inhabit places I otherwise only read about or see online, in journals like Courting Destiny (of which I thought when I passed the Fairway market) or NY Nitty-Gritty. Aside from walking around town and revisiting (or hoping to revisit) places I used to frequent (the Strand bookstores, for instance, which is not far from the South Street Seaport of which I took the picture on the right; or the aforementioned Argosy) I am taking it far easier than the tourist who feels obliged to cram the metropolitan experience into a tight schedule. Sure, I got my eyes on tickets for two Broadway shows: the highly acclaimed Grey Gardens and the much-maligned Deuce (starring Angela Lansbury); but that’ll have to wait until I am good and ready for evenings at the theater.

Luxuriating in leisure, I still need time sit down and to carry on with broadcastellan, which, after all, is a journal about sitting down, closing one’s eyes, and listening to the radio. Since I am enjoying a clear wireless signal (much to the surprise of this piggy-backer), I am able to make a few additions to my old-time radio recordings library. So, I guess I am squirreling it right now, gathering food for thought to be enjoyed in the comfort and quiet of my new home across the Atlantic . . .

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Low Brow/High Horse: Radio Vs. Television, Round Three

Well, I’ve been going over the results of the “Great British TV Survey” in the latest issue of the Radio Times. Surveys tickle me, which is probably why I used to enjoy guessing the answers on Family Feud. Anyway. I think I am just giddy about Eurovision on this eve of the semi-finals, the night Europe celebrates its Hasselhoffian roots. Sure enough, the Eurovision Song Contest tops the survey in the category of “guilty pleasure.” I know no such discreditable delights. If I am lowbrowsing for Sonja Henie, I don’t hope to find Hedda Gabler on skates. And if I expose myself to the pipes of radio’s “Vagabond Lover” (Rudy Vallee, left), I don’t expect Lorne Greene (or whatever’s the name of the opera that sounds like the actor who played the guy who ran the Ponderosa). I leave my high horse in the stable when treading on the thin ice that is likely to crack once one begins to account for one’s tastes or discounts those of the masses, the pondering of which is a hobbyhorse of the elitist.

That said, I could not fill out such a questionnaire without drawing a blank. I have remained immune to the charms of Doctor Who or Coronation Street. And much as I enjoyed shows like The Avengers and The Royle Family (a sort of Vic and Sade gone Eurotrash), I simply don’t know enough about the history of British “telly” to decide whether or not the medium’s offerings have gotten better or worse over the years. Not that I rely on the informed opinions of galaxies-removed stargazer Sir Patrick Moore, who had this to say on the topic:

[British television has gotten] much worse. Any interesting programmes are put on very late. The 650th edition of The Sky at Night [which Moore hosts] was put out at 2 AM [. . .]. The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days. I would like to see two independent wavelengths—one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men.

American radio programming, back when the wireless was the main source of home entertainment, often met with similar dismissals, a disdain for the popular that dates back to the days of bearbaiting and the origins of reading for pleasure. Some fifty years ago, Fortune Magazine called for a “Revolt against Radio,” arguing that a “very large part of America’s radio fare (most soap operas, quiz programs, audience-participation shows [the kinds of programs mocked by radio comedian Fred Allen on this day, 9 May, in 1948], gag-comedy acts, juke-music sessions, commercial announcements) would affect any person of modest discrimination somewhere in the range of complete indifference and acute illness.”

I don’t know what is worse: being talked down to by broadcasters or patronized by their critics? Perhaps this is why I turned (on) to old-time radio, the everyday in retrospection. It is so little regarded these days and treated (if at all) as being very nearly beyond criticism that it can be appreciated anew by those equipped with a keen ear and an open mind. Besides, what does it matter whether the brow is high or low once your eyes are closed? When you find yourself in the country of the blind, don’t trade that kingdom for a high horse.

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Fancy Pencils/Coloring Books: Radio Vs. Television, Round Two

Well, “I ‘aven’t patience.” For indifferent rehashings, that is. Last night I watched the premiere of the long-promised and (at least by me) highly anticipated made-for-television adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly (1910), a radio dramatization starring Boris Karloff I discussed previously. I have often wondered whether it might not be better to leave it to our minds to color our books or whether the pencils our fancy (or imagination) supplies while listening are perhaps too dull or small in number to do the coloring when not guided by the hand of experience.

Unlike Anthony Pelissier’s 1948 black-and-white screen adaptation starring John Mills, this Mr. Polly was shot in the rich polychromes of a Welsh summer—emerald, sunset gold, and sea blue. Not that Mr. Polly ever ventured into Wales; but Gillies MacKinnon’s picture was made here on location (which led me to create the above collage, the first lines of the novel covered by a Welsh shopfront as I saw it in an excellent state of preservation at the National History Museum at St. Fagans).

Perhaps, the pages were splashed with rather too much color. After all, Mr. Polly’s life is not at all a fancy or brilliant one. When first we meet him, he is middle-aged, dyspeptic, and so thoroughly dissatisfied with his middle-class existence as to contemplate suicide. The misery of his life (or, rather, the monochrome way in which Mr. Polly sees it) does not come across strongly in Adrian Hodges’s retelling of Wells’s story. Unlike the earlier movie adaptation, it even skips the famous opening scene, in which Mr. Polly, sitting on a metaphorical “stile between two threadbare-looking fields” and referring to his situation as a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!”

This new Mr. Polly is full of holes; and unlike the earlier adaptation, from which it frequently borrows, it tries to fill them synopsizing the character’s early life. Such skimming of pages (handled, in a quaint fashion, by resorting to title cards like “Three Years Later”) leaves us less with a sense of depth than with a feeling of being dragged across the surface without ever getting inside the man.

After all, as Wells put it, “Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. Polly,” his inner workings suggesting a “badly managed industrial city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, [. . .] and the thunder of tumbrils. . . .” However well-chosen the leading man, the look on Lee Evans’s suitably “dull and yellowish” face, rarely shown in close up, cannot convey this turmoil; and his lines, substituting for the novel’s opening, are comparatively prosaic.

Mr. Polly is looking more like Miss Potter; even his adversary, the villainous Jim, is looking pale, Wells’s characters drowning in pools of green. Radio adaptations do not suffer from such an excess of paint. Without being vulgar, they can take you “inside” a character like Mr. Polly, giving you a tour of his mind, his heart, and his bowels. They can preserve much of the original text without feeling compelled to translate them into images. They are more likely to succeed in being literate or liberating instead of literal or unfaithful. That is, they are less likely to be burdened by authenticity and claims of infidelity by not having to show us anything as it imagined (rather than imaged) in the text.

It is the listener’s responsibility to fill in the blanks with images supplied by formers readings, by travel and experience. To be sure, phony accents can be misleading; but radio adaptations (depending on the richness of the listener’s empirical knowledge of the world and prior literary excursions) are more likely to be generic than false. It is for these reasons that I’d rather listen to the soft-spoken Mr. Karloff, who, on 17 October 1948, gave voice to Mr. Polly’s complaints in the NBC University Theater production of Wells’s comic tale of discontent.

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The Life of Radio: Norman Corwin Turns 97

Well, I just cast my two votes in the National Election here in Wales. It is the first time I’ve been given such a voice in a country not my own, and the first I am asserting my right to raise it since leaving Germany for New York City back in 1990. It is an important election, too, considering that, beginning this month, the National Assembly for Wales is enjoying new legislative powers and can henceforth pass laws (or assembly measures) affecting everyday living in the principality. Now, I won’t divulge just where I placed that X on the ballot sheets; but—caveat: creaky transition—I am going to tell you who gets my vote for “Most Underrated and Ignored American Poet of the 20th Century.” That would be Norman Corwin, who on this 3 May 2007 celebrates his ninety-seventh birthday.

He has been called the “poet laureate” of American radio, even though that title was never officially bestowed. As writer, director, and producer, he created some of the most eloquent, witty and stirring plays ever conceived for listening. He was the life of the medium at a time when it was alive (if not always well) as an artistic forum, and is ready to reach out to those, including myself, who refuse to turn a deaf ear to it. As The Easy Ace reminds us, he had a profound influence on the lives and careers of creative minds (like the aforementioned Robert Altman) who turned on the radio and turned on to his works.

What is the life of radio? Is it the voice, the word made sound, or sound itself? Are the airwaves the domain of the bard who writes for recital or the journalist who listens and records? When asked (by Douglas Bell, in a published interview titled Years of the Electric Ear) whether he thought of himself as a “creative, imaginative writer or as a sociologist or documentarian,” Corwin declared himself to be “definitely” the former. Perhaps, he was rather too accepting of the dichotomy. After all, many of his most compelling pieces for radio are at once reportage and poetry.

It was not by choice that he assumed the role of a radio documentarian, that he achieved fame for commemorative specials like “On a Note of Triumph” and “We Hold These Truths” or acclaim for series like An American in England and One World Flight). He enjoyed being witty and whimsical, writing satires and fantasies in verse disclosing “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” or opening the case of “The Undecided Molecule”; but, once his powers of engaging the mind became known, he was being “importuned by radio entities” to speak on behalf of the American people in moments of sorrow, cheer, and sheer confusion.

The height of Corwin’s radio career—the heyday of the medium—coincides with the period of the Second World War; indeed, radio’s influence and status during those years was largely due to that global conflict, as the airwaves connected the home front to the theaters of war, however careful the filtration. For purposes of propaganda, radio recruited a great many authors who otherwise would have had little to do with the commerce-corrupted mass medium. In Corwin, broadcasters and government officials found an artist who not only knew the medium but loved and respected it, who could exploit it (rather than its listeners) while exploring its potentialities.

Corwin never turned his back on broadcasting, even when commercial radio in the US began to abandon the production of dramatic programming, already rendered largely inconsequential during the 1950s as a result of anti-Communist hysteria. Unlike many former radio playwrights, Corwin did not consider the airwaves to be a path to ostensibly bigger and better projects in other media. And if his writings are not nearly as well known today as they once were and deserve to be now, we should fault neither the topicality nor the transient nature of his work in sound, but cite the neglect of the stage on which it had been brought into existence.

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Dancing with Franchot Tone: Tenth Avenue Girl Gets to Be “Lady for a Day”

Fancy that, Florence Farley! You were one lucky teenager, when, early in March 1939, a photographer from the ever enterprising Hearst paper New York Journal American came to see a fashion show planned by you and the kids in your neighborhood—the none too fashionable Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. Subsequently, you were chosen to go to Hollywood and become a “Lady for a Day.” What’s more, on this day, 1 May, you got to tell millions of Americans about your experience, dutifully marvelling at the “simply swell” Lux toilet soap in return. After all, you were talking to Cecil B. DeMille, nominal producer of the Lux Radio Theater, and there had to be something in it for those who made you over, young lady, and made your day.

Mr. DeMille was in New York City for the premiere of his Union Pacific, while Leslie Howard took over as narrator and host in Hollywood; so, C. B. didn’t really have to go out of his way (or send you back, all expenses paid, to Tinseltown) to meet up with you. You had returned by then from your West Coast adventure, the title of “Lady” being bestowed upon you “with the understanding” that you would return to your “own workaday world.”

“I was just another girl,” you told the famous director, just as the script had it. “Gee,” you exclaimed, as anyone should, having had a break like yours. When prompted to do so, you told listeners of going to your “first nightclub,” where you met Dorothy Lamour and “danced with Franchot Tone.” He probably felt like dancing, too, considering that he was single again, his marriage with Joan Crawford having recently ended in divorce, which might not be as bad as going back to the tenements. By the way, I’m watching Harriet Craig tonight and wonder what it must have been like, living with Crawford. But never mind that now.

While in Hollywood, you also got to make a screentest, go for a “bicycle ride with Bob Hope,” and appear in a Paramount picture. Not that I could find your name anywhere on the Internet Movie Database. Who knows just how much of your dream come true is true, Florence Farley. Tell me, were you really glad to return to the tenements to live with your grandma and go out with boys who only dream of being Errol Flynn? Did you get to keep those “Cinderella slippers,” never having “paid more than $2 for shoes” before?

Yours was another thin slice of Hollywood baloney, a West Coast diversion from the butchery about to commence in the east to the east of you. It’s no coincidence, either, that the Lux Radio Theater presented an adaptation of Damon Runyon’s ”Madame La Gimp” (later aired under original title on the Damon Runyon Theater program and remade as Pocketful of Miracles starring Glenn Ford, who would have celebrated his 91st birthday today, had he not died last August). Nor is it surprising that your fairy tale fits so well into the scheme of selling things, of carving the mess of life into neat bars of soap.

You know, Flo, listening to your voice (more real than the hooey you were asked to repeat) and wondering about the life behind those lines of yours—the life behind the “human interest” story and the publicity act you were that spring—sure beats following the sentimental play on offer that night. Now let’s wash our hands of the whole affair, without so much as thinking about lathering with the sponsor’s product . . .

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Shutting Private Eyes; or, the Day Spade Kicked the Bucket

When is it ever the right time, the moment to call it a day after all those years and retire that greasy old trenchcoat—or whatever fashion-defying trademark you might have worn out long before your welcome? Who’s to say, or decide? Peter Falk, apparently, is having a tough time convincing executives that he’s still kicking anything but the bucket. He simply can’t get them to greenlight another Columbo mystery, not even one that closes the book on the four-decades old franchise. I was reminded of the booted gumshoe when, walking around Pest (as in Budapest), we came across that dive in the doctored snapshot.

Columbo is a legend, all right; but to those with an eye for fresh blood, that’s just a fancy way of saying “past it.” Those bags under your eyes sure can get you sacked. These days, wrinkles don’t give a guy character; they take it away from him. And unless you can pass yourself off as Miss Marple, your days in the business are numbered if you can still manage facial expressions.

It wasn’t a matter of putting a stud out to pasture, though, when Sam Spade was kicked out of the radio branch of his office on this day, 27 April, in 1951, after solving what those who got paid to put words into his mouth called, “for obvious reasons,” the “Hail and Farewell Caper.”

Spade wasn’t too old, see. Just ask his secretary, Effie, who would have loved to straighten more than his tie. Besides, on radio you’re as old as your voice can make others imagine you are; and tough-talking Spade was a good enough egg to make you think hardboiled rather than rotten. It was his father who got him axed. Dashiell Hammett, I mean, who got blacklisted for being so un-American as to exercise his right to a political position. After Washington started to dig and got red dirt on Hammett, no broadcaster dared to touch his Spade. That’s when they got out the axe.

There was some retooling, initially. But dropping Hammett’s name just wasn’t enough to appease the network, just as giving Spade a new voice (Stephen Dunne taking over for Howard Duff) did little to please prospective sponsors, the old one (Wildroot Cream Oil) having defected. What was left of Spade after the blunt instruments in the business of commercial broadcasting had operated on his larynx just wasn’t enough to convince listeners, who had fought to get their favorite detective back on the air and lift Spade’s two-month suspension in the fall of 1950.

Radio was a queer racket in those days. You could be a a Communist for the FBI, but not a pink private eye. As I said, a new agenda called for a new kind of scouring agent. It mattered little that Hammett had nothing to do with the writing of the show (he just collected the royalties, which is pretty good business sense for a Commie), or that the Spade on the air was about as red as the greenbacks he was after but always short of.

At the close of the “Hail and Farewell Caper,” Spade makes a final sales pitch, a word to prospective advertisers; but, being that it wasn’t yet time for the obligatory summer hiatus, during which executives decided the fate of radio heroes, the plea sounds out of place. If you ask me, it was a ruse intended to quiet listener protest by leaving some hope for a commercially sponsored resurrection, a denial of the politics behind the show’s death warrant. It was the spirit of the age that dug Spade‘s grave.