Their first radio production was Bram Stoker's Dracula, with Welles playing both Count Dracula and Doctor Seward. Music for the program was conducted by Bernard Herrmann. Houseman wrote the early scripts for the series, turning the job over to Howard Koch at the beginning of October. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, The Magnificent Ambersons, Heart of Darkness and other major literary works were offered to radio audiences during the Mercury Theatre on the Air's run. As a result, some of the most memorable Mercury Theatre on the Air productions were adaptations of great novels. But it was clear to Welles and Houseman that the medium of radio suited the telling of a story far better than the dramatization of it. There were exceptions, most notably Our Town by Welles' early mentor Thornton Wilder.
Whisperings radio program series#
The end result was a series of dramas based on literary, rather than dramatic, works. In close collaboration with John Houseman and other writers, Welles wrote, directed and performed in the productions. Chief among those choices was to create dramas specifically for the radio and not to simply adapt dramas in production at the Mercury Theatre for broadcast.
The choices he made in developing the series were informed by what he had learned in previous years in other radio dramas. But the series would be best remembered by the name it assumed with its second production, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.Īs with Les Misérables the previous year, Welles was given complete creative control by CBS over the new series. The idea was conceived as a series of narratives under the title First Person Singular. It was in that year that CBS, remembering Welles' work on Les Misérables the year before, approached him and Houseman about a series of radio dramas for its summer schedule. It seemed inevitable that the day would come when this medium, which had made Orson Welles a household name across the country, would become a part of his serious theater ambitions. Radio, with its power to excite the imagination and actually involve the audience in the creative process, had huge potential as a medium for serious drama. Paul Holler, writing in Critique, described the program's origin: The Mercury Theatre on the Air was an hour-long dramatic radio program which began in the summer of 1938 on the CBS radio network. It remains perhaps the most highly regarded radio drama anthology series ever broadcast, most likely due to the creativity of Orson Welles. Most episodes dramatized works of classic and contemporary literature. This was an unprecedented and expensive request, especially for one so young as Welles. Welles insisted his Mercury company - actors and crew - be involved in the radio series. Radio Guide initially mentioned the series' debut as Mercury Theatre before later listing it as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. However, this title was never announced on the air. In 1938, he was offered a chance to direct his own weekly, hour-long radio series, initially promoted as First Person Singular. Welles had already worked extensively in radio drama, playing the title character in The Shadow for a year and directing a seven-part adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, both for the Mutual Broadcasting System.
The last theatrical production of the company was Native Son in 1941. In 1939 Five Kings was produced along with The Green Goddess. They moved on to productions of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Heartbreak House, Too Much Johnson and Danton's Death in 1938. In 1937, Welles and the Mercury company earned a reputation for their inventive adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar set in contemporary Fascist Italy. 19 Mercury Theater's radio programmes - 17 from 1938 (July-November) and 2 from 1946īONUS: 1988 Special Programme - Mercury Theater Remembered with appearences and voices of those who worked in those programmes and still remember how Welles used to work.
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