Vintage or Modern Radio Drama Recommendations?

[skydog757]

I highly recommend "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" ( of course ) by The Firesign Theater.
Not exactly drama, but it is noir.

They pull it off brilliantly. Each time I listen I pick up on some inside humor that I'd missed before.

 

[DesertDan]

HPLHS produces very good adaptations of H.P.Lovecraft stories in a 1930's style.
They call them the "Dark Adventure Radio Theater" series
http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html

The H.P. Lovecraft Literay Podcast also does very nice dramatic readings of Lovecraft's works.
http://hppodcraft.com/

 

[Stray Cat]

I have been listening to our national radio-drama for a long time, but only recently have I entered the international waters.

 

[plain old dave]

I have a nominee: "Unshackled!"

A religious program, it started profiling clients of Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission and has broadened in scope. Real stories of people overcoming tremendous obstacles. If you get to Chicago, I don't recall which night it is but they DO offer tours with the main event being in the studio audience for a taping. To the best of my knowledge, Unshackled! is the longest-running and last OTR program on the radio. Been in continuous production since 1950's profiling of Billy Sunday on WGN.

 

[MikeKardec]

I'll open myself to a burning at the stake here but I really don't like many of the old radio dramas. There are some fantastic exceptions but in general they worried too much about what you couldn't see, throwing in a great deal of expositional dialog that clogged up the performances. Typical of the time, and like the previous critique it was just the style that was accepted, a lot of performances were really "stagey." We hadn't learned much from Lee Strasberg or Sandy Meisner yet. But I've got what is often an unpopular point of view, no one needs to agree with me! Hell, I think Brando would have a hard time getting parts given the exceptional pool of talent that's out there these days.

I've always been impressed by those who try to bring this medium into the 21th century in all ways rather than getting stuck in "olde timey" radio. Old Radio is fun for what it was but we need more people to try to make it what it CAN be! Imagine me cheering on my team ... whoever they are.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'll open myself to a burning at the stake here but I really don't like many of the old radio dramas. There are some fantastic exceptions but in general they worried too much about what you couldn't see, throwing in a great deal of expositional dialog that clogged up the performances. Typical of the time, and like the previous critique it was just the style that was accepted, a lot of performances were really "stagey." We hadn't learned much from Lee Strasberg or Sandy Meisner yet. But I've got what is often an unpopular point of view, no one needs to agree with me! Hell, I think Brando would have a hard time getting parts given the exceptional pool of talent that's out there these days.

I've always been impressed by those who try to bring this medium into the 21th century in all ways rather than getting stuck in "olde timey" radio. Old Radio is fun for what it was but we need more people to try to make it what it CAN be! Imagine me cheering on my team ... whoever they are.

I'll disagree with the argument that a stagey style was typical of radio drama -- as far back as 1928 Correll and Gosden had invented the representational style of radio acting, in which intimacy and low-key performance was an essential ingredient. The early 1930s version of "Amos 'n' Andy" may have been the most intimately-performed radio drama -- and in those days it was as much drama as it was comedy -- ever produced. Their command of representational acting was astoundingly good, especially since they were the very first radio actors to perform in that style.

Presentational -- or stagey -- acting was common mostly among performers who weren't developed and trained in radio, a lot of the Broadway types who got into radio sideways during the Depression, and also the Hollywood movie crowd from a bit later on. It's instructive to listen to such programs as "Lux Radio Theatre," in which the movie people tend to perform like they're on the big screen, but the supporting actors, the anonymous AFRA people, are acting in a quiet, representational manner. The fact that the most commonly-circulated programs among the "OTR" crowd are exactly the sorts of programs that tended to feature stage or movie-trained people is what creates the illusion that most radio was like this. But great swaths of radio were not.

My view, honed by more than forty years of study of the medium, is that the very best form of radio drama -- the form that boils it down to its absolute essentials -- is the simple, two-person dialogue scene, such as "Amos 'n' Andy" was in its first fifteen years, or as "Lum and Abner" was, or as "Easy Aces" was, or as "Vic and Sade" was, or as "The Goldbergs" was. None of these programs used elaborate staging or sound effects, and none of the actors performed in a broad, stagey style. That is the kind of acting that modern radio actors ought to be using as a pattern, not the Orson Welles declamatory presentational style.

Interestingly, more than twenty years before anybody ever heard of Lee Strasberg or Method Acting, Freeman Gosden told an interviewer that acting convincingly on radio required the actor to *become* the character, to completely immerse himself in the emotions of the role, rather than just standing there reading the lines.

I've listened to a lot of modern radio drama -- and some of the technical stuff is quite impressive. But I've yet to hear two modern radio actors simply exchanging mundane dialogue as convincingly as Correll and Gosden, Lauck and Goff, Goodman and Jane Ace, Van Harvey, Flynn and Idelson, or Gertrude Berg and her cast did.

 

[MikeKardec]

Very good! Obviously I have to go back and take a listen into the background of the Lux stuff. I've heard material I liked a lot but not all that often. A lot of my listening recently has been BBC. Of course writers had to take responsibility for a good deal of exposition that gets worked out in a lot of radio drama ... it's a pretty rare day when an actor is better than his or her scenes! I got into doing some radio stuff years ago by being hired to fix the writing.

There is so much potential, it's about as intimate a medium as possible. It's pretty rare in film to be able to get a mic two inches from someone's lips in a dead quiet space!

 

[The Wolf]

There really was a variety in realism on radio shows. This included explaining for the listener. Some radio shows were subtle and used sound effects to fill in the mental picture. Some shows would have dialogue like "I'll just climb in this window, there the window is open. I got one leg in. Now the other, I'm inside.".
You can't one style as being representative of them all.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

 

[MikeKardec]

There really was a variety in realism on radio shows.

Oh gosh, I sure know it. I've been guilty of some of those variations ... there's nothing like the protestations of the guilty! We never did the "I'll just climb out this window ..." shtick but plenty of other stereotypes, ambitious mistakes and foolishness. A good deal of the learning process was just discarding some of the olde timey thinking that we didn't even know we had at first. I used to write (everything) in a more stylized manner too, it took awhile to grow up enough to stop doing that too. That was fun but in the end I sort of thought it was holding whatever audience there was at a distance.

Some of the old style that Lizzie rightly calls "presentational," seems to have had that distancing effect. I suspect that older audiences didn't really want to be as intimate with their entertainment as we are today ... I think it would have made them feel uncomfortable. Just like we've moved microphones closer and closer in music recording (until now the mics are "in" the instrument) writers and actors have moved the performance from a comfortable distance to often all too raw proximity.

I've always been intrigued by the memory of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind ... I haven't seen it in quite awhile. If memory serves, he's giving an era specific performance, pretty much what you'd expect but she's doing something that might have been considered modern 25 later.

 

[Dennis Young]

I like several different types of OTR. In fact, its my latest passion.



I started out listening to Amos and Andy. I love that show and that’s what led me to find out about OTR online. To me, there is no funnier show either on radio or in tv history. (Sanford and Son comes closest).


I love Nick Carter too. I used to read the Nick Carter books, but in those he was a secret agent….the Killmaster. Sort of a James Bond type. Imagine my surprise to find out that, not only was he initially a detective, but that he actually predated Sherlock Holmes! The radio shows are some of my favorites now.


I like Marlow. And Boston Blackie. Charlie Chan and Dick Tracy. (Yeah, a lot of what I enjoy was aimed at younger fans). Mike Shayne. I first became acquainted with this series on Turner Classic Movies. Fun show. Harry Lime. Orson Welles did a ton of those and they are great. But after awhile I get tired of that annoying music. And I love the Shadow. Welles did some of those too.


But I also love the Sci Fi stuff too! Space Patrol and Tom Corbett are two of my favorites! X minus One is fun. Dimension X is too.


And then there are the westerns. Gunsmoke. The Lone Ranger. And the comic book heroes. Superman has a lot of stuff online. And Batman. And there is a character called the Blue Beatle, but I understand this character is for really young kids and so I havent given it a go yet. And Tarzan. Tarzan is good too. J