1940's Radio Hour, The Bolton Theater, Directed by Will Rhys, Musical Direction by David Gooding

A real audience pleaser, this show was, at its best, very good, and at its worst truuly dreadful. The problem was that a couple of the singers couldn't. And while an actor who sings is really good for some material, this material really needed singers who could act and actors who could really sing. We did a lot of fun clowining, with Dudley Swetland playing the backstage prop man--a non singer who didn't have to sing! Sharon Bicknell and I got one more specialty number, this one, as you see involving a series of lifts as I inconveniently lost my trousers: dignity, alsways dignity. The vocally blessed Tom Fulton crooning his way through some lovely romantic ballads, etc. And one poor leading lady, who should remain nameless here, who couldn't sing a lick who had a featured number which really wanted a singer's singer. Audiences were very forgiving (or tone deaf) or perhaps thought that the emotional/drugged state of the character could account for the painful rendition of a standard torch song. In any case, we survived this one.

My program notes:

And now for something completely different! No meal is complete without something light and delightful for dessert. All work and no play after all... And certainly no season would be complete without a light course to cleanse the theatrical palate. As we enter 1987, the Play House takes you back 45 years to Christmas week 1942, before television had deadened our individual imaginations, long before the Beatles established the anti-establishment Establishment, even before Elvis mad it all right for men to shake their whatevers...This was the time when Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington were knocking them dead with their own wonderful set of sounds: when the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Sammy Fain, Mac Gordon and the Gershwins were writing music for Broadway that became the popular songs of the day. (Hum something from Sunday in the Park With George--quickly now!) It was a blessed time before Madonna and Hulk Hogan shaped our culture. I'd write a satire on the current cultural scene, but how on earth does one parody Cyndi Lauper? Let alone John Cage? I can't wait for the PhD theses on the underlying cultural commentary and consciousness raising on MTV. Enough! This is 1942, not 1987! Let's not attack each other: let's attack only the enemies overseas and celebrate our American Golden Age of Radio.

Set in the seedy studios of WOV, a mythical 5,000-watt radio station on New York City, The 1940's Radio Hour gives us just what it says it will: copious doses of that wonderful music together with some snatches of old fashioned serialized radio-drama and even commercials you'll recognize from the 40's and, coincidentally, a glimpse of what radio was really like in the less affluent corners of the business. Rebecca (the one from Sunnybrook Farm, not Daphne Du Maurier's) never had it so underfunded. There's a war on, after all.

So join the rest of the studio audience, watch for the applause signs, tune up your listening skills and settle back--escape back--to 1942. Leave the Bolton Theatre behind. Close your eyes, if you like, and pretend you never saw a television screen. But I warn you, you'll miss half the fun of seeing the hi-jinkks that the loyal listeners of the 40's rarely saw. We'll have more meat and fish courses later on, but for tonight, eat, drink, be merry and escape into the theater and the music as we did 45 years ago. And enjoy!