Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Thrones of the Seven Days

The most famous production of the Mercury Theatre on the Air founded by Orson Welles and John Housman was the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast; but they had a number of other classics too. Kim Scarbrough has a webpage where you can find a number of them. I just finished listening to the broadcast of The Man Who Was Thursday, one of the best they made (and all there work is already among the best of the best), which first went to air two weeks before the War of the Worlds broadcast. It is quite interesting because the radio version, by cutting out much of information about the Days, makes Chesterton's strange story even stranger (but still quite good). Welles was apparently a fan of the book, saying it had shamelessly beautiful prose. The transcript is also online.

The Dracula broadcast also brings out some of the stranger features of its original source material.