The Great Plays Radio Program

Background

From the February 5, 1938 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press:

By some sort of coincidence NBC made a simultaneous announcement to the effect, Masterpieces of theater literature, selected from the classics to trace the development of drama from the productions in the Theater Dionysus in ancient Athens down to the stage of present-day Broadway, will be presented in a series of full-hour weekly broadcasts starting Saturday, February 26. The series, entitled Great Plays, will be heard from 4 to 5 p.m. CST over the NBC-Red Network. Starting with "The Birds," a satiric comedy by Aristophanes, the plays will include examples of morality drama, the comedia dell'arte of Italy, pre-Shakespearean and Shakespearean drama in England, the French theater, the English theater of the 18th century, early American drama, the Irish theater and contemporary American drama.

Great Plays was arguably the NBC Blue Network's most prestigious, serious Drama presentation before World War II. For its time it was unquestionably one of the most highly engineered, well-mounted, well produced series of its kind in Radio.

One glance at the stunning array of respected dramatic talent among the actors who participlated in this long-running flagship series reveals that--for a time, anyway--NBC's Blue Network skimped nothing on production values or talent. Nor did they shy away from otherwise difficult scripts or stage plays. These were Great Plays from around the world, a great many of which had never been heard before on American Radio. The production rights and licensing costs for this series had to have been staggering for their time, given the calibre of the plays they mounted in the first four seasons alone.

Neither are any of these plays light-weights by any measure. These were serious, time-honored, highly respected literary stage presentations written by the world's most famous and respected literary talents. The various works upon which this series was based could form the basis of any serious Library of Drama anywhere in the world.

These productions were Classics for lovers of The Classics, and NBC made no bones about promoting the series just that way. Indeed, they produced a reading guide to accompany the first four seasons, to aid both seasoned and novice Classics aficionados to both navigate and anticipate each season's new offerings. The production values--for their time--were absolutely top-notch and the series first four seasons were both highly acclaimed and avidly received.

As always with any Golden Age Radio era production, one must keep an historical perspective of the series under review. This was an immediately post-Depression production aimed as much toward reminding America that it's Performing Arts were both intact and as readily available as they were during the Turn of the Century and the post Great War recovery years. The Great Depression clearly destroyed the economically disenfranchised, but had an even more devastating effect on what had been a growing Middle Class.

This series remained a reminder as much to students of the Classics as to a highly civilized nation still crawling out of the most devastating economic collapse in its young history that, despite its setbacks, the backbone of its cultural connection to the world's civilization was still intact. These plays were as much of a comfort to America's middle class as it was to its national sense of pride and determination to rise above its economic collapse and scratch, claw and scrape its way back to a stable, civilized Democracy.

To those ends, this series remains an important and historical bridge spanning those difficult years of sacrifice and determination to rise above this young nation's first serious taste of economic and moral collapse--a lesson we're currently revisiting at the beginning of our nation's 21st Century.

As to the demise of Great Plays, and all the fine NBC stage play productions of the previous twelve years, Time Magazine made this observation in their article from Monday, Apr. 13, 1942:

Radio: Great Plays

Last week, for the first time in more than twelve radio seasons, neither NBC (the old Red network) nor the Blue Network broadcast an hour-long adaptation of a stage play. None was scheduled for the future. Possibly not many millions of listeners noticed this, but it meant that the book was closed on an era of radio.

Early enthusiasts and amateurs of broadcasting took the theater as their heritage, as a matter of course. At first, being poor, they stuck to classics on which no royalties had to be paid. In 1928 pioneering NBC broadcast The Tempest—the first Shakespeare on the air. In that year it also produced classic Victorian melodramas like East Lynne.

By 1930, having progressed to Ibsen, NBC formed a Radio Guild, boldly undertook to produce one play a week, 52 weeks in the year. For several years one man, Vernon Radcliff, adapted every play, directed every performance. NBC, prospering in the great Depression, gave him enough money to allow productions of Galsworthy, Barrie, George S. Kaufman.

By 1938 another type of radio drama was in full flower, especially at CBS: the original radio script, with its narrators, its musical "bridges," its fade-outs, fade-ins, sound effects. Daytime serials had long since arrived.

Another arrival in radio about this time was "the educational tie-up" by which networks displayed their utility and virtue. Colleges listened as NBC's "Great Plays Series," successor to the Radio Guild, started off in 1938 and in 1938-39 went on a grand tour of the ages, opening with Blanche Yurka in The Trojan Women. Other items that year: Molière, Tolstoi and George Bernard Shaw's own adaptation of Back to Methuselah. In the last three years this sort of thing has been overshadowed by commercial radio theaters, the fresh work of the Columbia Workshop, variety shows.

Last week NBC producers and directors, meditating on the twelve-year experience, wondered if the future belonged to "original" radio writing (many examples of which have not exceeded the talents of a smart high-school boy), or if the classic works of the theater would again be broadcast. Conceding that about one in 20 of their past productions had had truly professional finish, they agreed on certain requirements for future radio playhouses. One requirement: more than the six to seven hours of rehearsal that are now routine.

As it turned out, neither Famous Fireside Plays nor The Blue Network's Blue Theatre Plays rose to Time Magazine's cited standards. Apparently Blue Network executives agreed with them.

The Great Plays production run remains a highly collectable, influential, highly educational series for its time, and is well worth the effort finding, enjoying, and preserving this landmark cultural waypoint in Golden Age Radio History.

Series Derivatives:

Season 2: 38-10-16 01 The Trojan Women by Euripides

Season 3: 39-10-15 01 Antigone by Sophocles

Season 4: 40-10-13 01 A Cavalcade Of Drama: From Ancient Greece To Modern Broadway by Various Authors

Season 5: 41-11-16 01 A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Famous Fireside Plays: 42-02-01 01 Thunder Rock

Notes on Provenances:

All above cited provenances are in error in one form or another. The most helpful provenance was the log of the radioGOLDINdex.

While there were, indeed, five seasons of Great Plays, there were also two alleged derivatives: Famous Fireside Plays and the alleged Blue Theatre Plays extension of Great Plays, neither of which maintained either the production values or classical patina of the five seasons of Great Plays, proper. One can only surmise that, with the break up of NBC by the U.S. Justice Department, Great Plays, one of NBC's corporately produced and sustained productions, suffered somewhat during the period of the breakup and transition.

• Famous Fireside Plays ran briefly from 42-02-08 through 42-03-29, airing on Sundays at 1:00 pm, for 55 minutes.
• Blue Theatre Plays (a completely different program, as it turns out) ran from 42-04-05 through 42-08-30, airing on Sundays at 1:00 pm or 2:00 pm, depending on time zone, for 25 minutes.

Blue Theatre Plays differs so materially from Great Plays as to question the lineage of this derivative, but provenances clearly show this derivative in the same timeslot, on the same days, but solely on the Blue Network, hence the name of the series. Conflicting logs and provenances abound for this series. The Grams book makes no distinction whatsoever between the five seasons of Great Plays and it's two derivatives, but nevertheless, cites a continuous run of Great Plays from 38-02-26 through 42-08-30. This is patently false [see below]. The Hickerson Guide shows Blue Theatre Plays running from 42-04-05 through 42-09-06, but this is not supported by any newspaper or alternative contemporary provenance.

There were several material errors in most of the alternate logs for this series, as follows:

• 1. Season 1, Episode 4, is properly titled 'Tamburlaine' not 'Tamerlane'.
• 2. Season 1, Episode 10, is properly titled 'The Playboy of The Western World' not 'Playboy of The Western World'.
• 3. Season 2, Episode 8, is properly titled 'The Cid' or 'Le Cid', but not 'El Cid' as it's a French classic not a Spanish classic.
• 4. Season 2, Episode 12, is properly titled 'School For Scandal' not 'The School Of Scandal'.
• 5. Season 2, Episode 20, is properly titled 'Camille' not 'Camile'.
• 6. Season 3, Episode 19, is properly titled 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' not 'The Second Mrs Tanquerry'.
• 7. Season 3, Episode 19, is properly titled 'Pelleas et Melisande' not 'Pelleas at Mellisands'.
• 8. Season 4, Episode 1, is properly titled 'A Cavalcade Of Drama: From Ancient Greece To Modern Broadway' not 'Greece To Broadway'.
• 8. Season 4, Episode 28, is properly titled 'Trelawny Of The Wells' not 'Trelawny Of The Walls'.
• 9. Season 1 of Great Plays aired on Saturdays, not Sundays.
• 10. Season 5, Episode 6 of Great Plays was pre-empted, but should have been 'Jeppe of The Hill'. Though this episode appears to not have aired, or rescheduled, it's referred to in a release from NBC to newspapers, announcing a series of Season 5 Great Plays, to include "A Doll's House, The Playboy of the Western World, The Inspector General, Camille, The American Way, Jeppe of The Hill, and The Taming of The Shrew" to be broadcast during November and December of 1941. The provenance is the Sunday, November 16, 1941 edition of the Kingsport Times [HERE]. Since we can account for six of these productions and their air dates, the only production not to be aired during the last two months of 1941 was 'Jeppe of The Hill'. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the production that would have aired on 41-12-22, but was pre-empted, but not rescheduled should have been 'Jeppe of The Hill'.
• 11. Episode 1 of Blue Theatre Plays is properly titled, 'There Goes Ichery Van', not 'There Goes Ichery Man'. The title is derived from a Henry David Thoreau reference to a child's nonsense poem of the era that goes, "Iery-wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan", from Thoreau's "Walking", from 1862.
• 12. As it turns out, Blue Theatre Plays had nothing whatsoever to do with Great Plays. Blue Theatre Plays appears to have been one of The Blue Network's new offerings, comprised of a repertory group named, appropriately enough, The Blue Theatre Players, comprised of Frank Lovejoy, Joan Banks, Santos Ortega, and Lindsay MacHarrie, among others. This lends further support to our contention that Blue Theatre Plays was not, in fact, a continuation of Great Plays at all. Note our provenance [HERE] .

All we can continue to do, is much the same as what the OTR Errors site does for all circulating vintage radio errors but the OTTER database errors: continue to cite the most glaring circulating errors of all--those exponentially perpetuated by the OTRR's OTTER database.

Circulating recording fraud alert:

• A set of some thirty-nine fraudulently encoded exemplars of Great Plays is in wide circulation:
  • 128kbps, 44000hz, Mono (5.5:1) recordings up-encoded from nominal 32kpbs, 22000hz, 11:1 recordings
  • 192kbps, 44000hz, Stereo (7.41:1) recordings up-encoded from nominal 128kpbs, 44000hz, 11:1 stereo recordings
• The great majority of these fraudulent encodes seem to emanate from the currently circulating collection of Great Plays recordings from the OTRR collection. Exercise caution when downloading from such sources.
• None of the Great Plays canon were broadcast in stereo--ever.
• The result of this type of fraud is that iPod and other .mp3 player users give up between 300Mbs and 600Mbs of disk or memory space when employing these fraudulent encodes.
• The original 1938-1941 transcriptions were understandably monaural recordings. There's no point whatsoever in encoding such recordings as stereo. There's no separation, in any case, and all one ends up with is left and right channels of the identically same monaural recording. But that adds as much as 33% to the storage size of even nominal encodes.
• The vast majority of previously circulating encodes of Great Plays were nominal 32kbps, 22000hz or 64kbps, 44000hz, 11:1 monaural recordings. Short of first-generation encodes, these are more than high enough fidelity to appreciate the most subtle nuances of any of the surviving Great Plays recordings currently in wide circulation. This will also save most iPod and .mp3 player users as much as 600 Mbs of disk space.

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Great Plays Series Radio Program Log

'A Doll's House'
Opens Fifth Year
For Great Plays

New York-Ibsen's "A Doll's House," thc play which started a social revolution 'against Victorian prudishness, has been chosen to introduce the National Broadcasting Company's fifth consecutive season of "Great Plays" over the NBC Blue Network, today from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., EST.
Ruth Gordon, winsome and talented artist who brought New York theater-goers to their feet when she revived thc vital role on Broadwav in 1937 and who scored an equally great success in a radio version over NBC on its second "Great Plays" season in 1939, will again be heard as the doll-like heroine , who finally declares her independence from a husband who worships, but does not respect her.
For the second play of the series on Nov. 23, NBC plans to present John Millington Synge's immortal "Playboy of the Western World," played by a brilliant cast. And on succeeding weeks of November and December, the tentative schedule calls for productions of Ludwig Holberg's "Jeppe of the Hill; Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock"; "The Inspector General" of Gogol: "Camille" by Damas Fils, and Shakespeare's "The Taming of The Shrew." Some of these will be new to "Great Plays" listeners. Others are being repeated by popular request from the general public and from students and educators who follow the series closely.
"Great Plays" are to be presented under the personal supervision of Clarences L. Menser, NBC's national production manager. Lester O'Keefe, a leading member of the company's production division, will direct. Radio adaptations of the classics are to be prepared by Chalres H. Newton, jr., a student of the drama and a member of the Script Division. Tom Bennett, of the NBC Music Division, will compose original scores for many of the broadcasts.
"Several innovations will be introduced in 'Great Plays' this season," Menser reports. "We intend to keep the aspects that have appealed to students and educators so far as the choice of classics and stars is concerned. However, for the benefit of the general public, we are going to stress entertainment first and education aspects second."

Famous Fireside Plays Radio Program Log

Blue Theatre Plays Radio Program Log

Great Plays Biographies

Clad in white Indiana limestone, the 70-story building's jagged form follows zoning regulations imposed on high-rise buildings of the era, each setback corresponding to a reduction in the amount of elevators, and thus in the total size of elevator shafts.

The construction of this building was made possible--from a legal zoning standpoint--by combining all of the land in Rockefeller Center into one zoning lot, so that there was enough "air" space around the building.

The relative "economy" of the 2 million square feet of the building impressed even the hardened businessmen who rented the office space to various tenants: no rentable area exceeded a 'profitable' distance from the windows; it was also their aim to provide every workroom with direct natural lightning. The building housed, at the time of its completion, the largest floor area of any commercial building hitherto constructed in Manhattan.

The 65th floor houses the stylish Rainbow Room restaurant with generous views over Midtown Manhattan. For decades the terraced open-air observatory was open to the public, until the expansion of the restaurant and its adjoining Rainbow Grill bar lounge necessitated the closing of the rooftop facility.

The Art Deco architecture of the building follows heroic and mythical themes, combined with praise of modernity and visualized in form of classical figures at work, or gods and goddesses of varying virtues. The Rockefellers, in fact, employed the mind of consultant philosopher Hartley Burr Alexander who defined the ideological theme for the Center. In the niché above the entrance is Lee Lawrie's relief Genius. The lobby artwork was originally to be commissioned from such heavyweights as Matisse and Picasso, but eventually José Maria Sert made the murals, American Progress and Time, whereas Diego Rivera's mural incorporating Lenin as "the leader of the worker's movement" was too much, leading to its removal...

At the foot of the building is the sunken plaza, originally planned as an entrance to the center's subway station. As the construction of the subway station was delayed, the plaza was lined with below-grade luxury shops. In 1936, to divert attention from the commercial failures of the retailers, the plaza was first turned into a public roller rink and subsequently into a more upper class wintertime ice skating rink and a summertime café. Paul Manship's gilded bronze sculpture Prometheus lies above the fountain pool of the plaza. Every Christmas an illuminated giant spruce is erected on Rockefeller Plaza above the statue -- the first one was the 1931 construction workers' tree, albeit a far more down-to-earth decorated one.

The flat roof between the main tower and the wing facing Sixth Avenue (the GE Building West) houses a roof-top garden.

The building changed hands in 1986, when General Electric incorporated RCA, along with its subsidiary NBC. Ten years later, when the Center was bought by a group led by Goldman Sachs and Jerry Speyer, the condominium interest of the building was sold to NBC for $440 million.

This splendid spindly tower became the General Electric Building when its lead tenant, RCA Victor, was wooed away to Rockefeller Center to put its name on 30 Rockefeller Plaza, is one of the city's most exquisite Art Deco jewels.

It is ironic that General Electric should end up putting its initials atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The moral must be that if you lease a lot of space here there's a big future for your logo spectacular at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

After General Electric replaced the large RCA red neon logo atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza with its own, it gave this building to Columbia University, which, in turn, entered a venture with Bernard Mendik, the developer, and other investors, to lease much of the office space to other tenants.

Tucked behind St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church that fronts on Park Avenue, this tower boasts a fantastic top that may well be the most original and attractive skyscraper roof in the world. (The Chrysler Building's spire, a few blocks south, is wonderful pure Art Deco, but this is a far more elaborate sculpting and is more thematically consistent with its lead tenant's business than the Chrysler's stainless steel wings' relations to an automobile company.)

Rising from its small site, this tower serves as an unofficial campanile to the church and honors it further with its warmly intense color, most unusual for a commercial building and a very early example of skyscraper design.

By today's standards, the lobby, which cannot hold a proverbial candle to the building’s top, is sedate and small, although its polished walls and vaulted ceilings are handsome. But in its day it was innovative in its attempt to break new ground.

John W. Cross, the architect, placed an important emphasis on the lobby:

"Designing this first floor hall was the sort of task of which one borrows nothing consciously from the wealth of past developments in architectural art, but strikes out into the future as far as imagination can penetrate."

"Romantic though radio may be, it is at the same time intangible and elusive - a thing which can be captured visually only through symbolism. There is vitality in the aluminum ceiling, and although it is vaulted it is free from any suggestion of past times or places. The severity of the vertical lines, which intersect the curves of the ceiling with daring abruptness, is intended to convey the directness and penetration of radio itself. And the slabs of light which issue from concealed sources in the side wall sconces to be reflected downward at a thousand angles from the ceiling’s bright surface, hint at the broadcast stations which curl their signals into every corner of the land," Cross said in the May 30, 1931 issue of the Real Estate Record and Guide.

"Season it with a dash of salt and a lot of pep—but go easy with the tabasco."

From that point on, for C. Blevins Davis, The Great White Way became easy street. Headwaiters snapped forth to greet him, smiling with appropriately lowered eyes. He reinvented himself as a patron of the arts, sponsoring a show of new German paintings in Munich. He threw a reception and dinner party for his fellow Missourians, President & Mrs. Harry Truman, at his fabulous Missouri 'farm', Trianon, and frequently squired daughter Margaret Truman to public functions.

Life among The 400 had its ebbs and flows, and Blevins Davis endured his own share of them. Indeed, one of his more notorious speed-bumps along the Great White Way arose from a suit by Joseph Williams Collins, a salesman, alleging that he essentially created the C. Blevins Davis persona by grooming him for rubbing shoulders with The 400. Collins apparently bought Blevins Davis' clothes and settled legal judgements against Davis--all apparently in preparation for finding a suitably wealthy society matron for Blevins Davis, with which to act as matchmaker for the inevitable wedding bans. Clearly, his ministrations to Mrs. Hill proved fruitful and the match was made. Collins further alleged that, in those days C. Blevins spoke gratefully of buying his trainer & manager a farm where Collins "could raise a few cows or chickens."

Instead--once married--Davis gave Collins the New York Brushoff. Collins sought $250,000 for his efforts to aid Davis socially, $100,000 in damages for Davis having twice beaten him up, and the $4,300 which he claimed to have spent in keeping Davis groomed and presentable for The 400.

C. Blevins Davis' lawyer dealt swiftly with the lawsuit. The statute of limitations had already run on the assault cases, and as to the rest, Collins didn't have a leg to stand on—he wasn't a licensed marriage broker. And almost parenthetically, the lawyer added, Client Davis denied the whole story in any case.

Blevins Davis' fortunes further waxed and waned over the next 20 years, but as occasionally happens with wealth from 'found money', Blevins Davis eventually lost Trianon, repeatedly over-mortgaging the property to finance failed stage productions and his lavish lifestyle, moved to Peru, and eventually died penniless in London in 1971. His body was flown back to Independence, MO for interment.