MUS Board of Regents - November 21, 2019
MUS Board of Regents - November Day 1
Suspense: Pink Camellias / Angel of Death / The Pasteboard Box
The program's heyday was in the early 1950s, when radio actor, producer and director Elliott Lewis took over (still during the Wilcox/Autolite run). Here the material reached new levels of sophistication. The writing was taut, and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars — often playing against type — such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode, Backseat Driver, which originally aired February 3, 1949.
The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain. At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. On the May 10, 1951 Suspense, Lewis reversed the roles with Death on My Hands: A bandleader (Harris) is horrified when an autograph-seeking fan accidentally shoots herself and dies in his hotel room, and a vocalist (Faye) tries to help him as the townfolk call for vigilante justice against him.
With the rise of television and the departures of Lewis and Autolite, subsequent producers (Antony Ellis, William N. Robson and others) struggled to maintain the series despite shrinking budgets, the availability of fewer name actors, and listenership decline. To save money, the program frequently used scripts first broadcast by another noteworthy CBS anthology, Escape. In addition to these tales of exotic adventure, Suspense expanded its repertoire to include more science fiction and supernatural content. By the end of its run, the series was remaking scripts from the long-canceled program The Mysterious Traveler. A time travel tale like Robert Arthur's The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln or a thriller about a death ray-wielding mad scientist would alternate with more run-of-the-mill crime dramas.
A Matter of Logic / Bring on the Angels / The Stronger
The Stronger (Swedish: Den starkare) is a famous 1889 play by August Strindberg. The play is quite short, consisting of only one scene that can be performed in approximately 10 minutes. The characters consist of only two women: a Mrs. X and a Miss. Y, only one of whom speak, an example of a dramatic monologue. It was adapted into a 1952 opera by composer Hugo Weisgall and there have been numerous film and television adaptations of the work. It has also been expanded and adapted into a forty-minute English-language zarzuela with a Madrid setting by Derek Barnes (2010), with text by Christopher Webber.
Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 -- 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter.[2][3][4] A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics.[5] A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.[6][7] From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film.[8] He is considered the father of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.[9][10]
In Sweden Strindberg is both known as a novelist and a playwright, but in most other countries he is almost only known as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough.[2][11] In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that -- building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play — responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto Naturalism in the Theatre (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887).[12] In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the vacillating, disintegrated characters is emphasised.[13] Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays On Psychic Murder (1887), On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.[14]
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult.[15] A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his Inferno crisis) led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden.[15] Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become the Zola of the Occult.[16] In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.[17] His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatise the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters -- was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.[18] He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career.[19] He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modelled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Young Love: Audition Show / Engagement Ceremony / Visit by Janet's Mom and Jimmy's Dad
Janet Waldo (born February 4, 1924) is an American actress and voice artist with a career encompassing radio, television, animation and live-action films. She is best known in animation for voicing Judy Jetson, Penelope Pitstop and Josie McCoy in Josie and the Pussycats. She was equally famed for radio's Meet Corliss Archer, a title role with which she was so identified that she was drawn into the comic book adaptation.
Waldo appeared in several dozen films in uncredited bit parts and small roles, although she was the leading lady in three Westerns, two of them starring Tim Holt. Her big break came in radio with a part on Cecil B. DeMille's Lux Radio Theater. In her radio career, she lent her voice to many programs, including Edward G. Robinson's Big Town, The Eddie Bracken Show, Favorite Story, Four-Star Playhouse, The Gallant Heart, One Man's Family, Sears Radio Theater and Stars over Hollywood. She co-starred with Jimmy Lydon in the CBS situation comedy Young Love (1949--50), and she had recurring roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (as teenager Emmy Lou), The Red Skelton Show and People Are Funny.
However, it was her eight-year run starring as teenager Corliss Archer on CBS's Meet Corliss Archer that left a lasting impression, even though Shirley Temple starred in the film adaptations, Kiss and Tell and A Kiss for Corliss. The radio program was the CBS answer to NBC's popular A Date with Judy. Despite the long run of Meet Corliss Archer, less than 24 episodes are known to exist. Waldo later turned down the offer to portray Corliss in a television adaptation.
In 1948 the Meet Corliss Archer comic book, using Waldo's likeness, published by Fox Feature Syndicate, appeared for a run of three issues from March to July 1948, using the original scripts. The same year, Waldo married playwright Robert Edwin Lee, the writing partner of Jerome Lawrence. The couple had two children, and remained married until his death in 1994.
Waldo made a rare on-screen television appearance when she appeared as Peggy, a teen smitten with Ricky Ricardo on a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy titled The Young Fans with Richard Crenna. Ten years later, Waldo again worked with Lucille Ball, this time playing Lucy Carmichael's sister, Marge, on The Lucy Show. That episode, Lucy's Sister Pays A Visit also featured actor Peter Marshall. She also appeared on an episode of The Andy Griffith Show as Amanda. In addition, Waldo reprised the role of Emmy Lou for some early TV episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Later, she was the female lead opposite Anthony Franciosa in the short-lived sitcom Valentine's Day (1964).
Shirley Mitchell (born November 4, 1919) is an American film and television actress.
After moving to Chicago, she appeared in the network broadcast of The First Nighter and played small parts in various soap operas including The Story of Mary Marlin and The Road of Life. After moving to Los Angeles, she played opposite Joan Davis in The Sealtest Village Store. She also starred as Louella in The Life of Riley and joined the cast of Fibber McGee and Molly as Alice Darling in 1943. Her most prominent radio role was that of the charismatic Southern belle Leila Ransom on The Great Gildersleeve radio show beginning in September 1942. In 1953, Shirley joined the cast of I Love Lucy playing the part of Lucy Ricardo's friend Marion Strong. As of 2012, she is the only recurring adult cast member still living following the deaths of Doris Singleton in 2012 and Peggy Rea in 2011. In 1962, she played Mrs. Colton on the CBS-TV comedy series Pete and Gladys, and between 1965--1967, she appeared as neighbor Marge Thornton on NBC-TVs Please Don't Eat the Daisies. In the same year she appeared in Episode 13, Season 2 of The Dick Van Dyke Show when she played Shirley Rogers opposite Bob Crane as Harry Rogers in Somebody Has to Play Cleopatra. In 1963, she appeared on the television program The Beverly Hillbillies as Opal Clampett (the wife of Jake Clampett, an out-of-work actor). In 1966, she appeared in Green Acres as a nurse and as Oliver's old friend Wanda. Between 1967 and 1968, she portrayed Kate Bradley's cousin Mae Belle Jennings on Petticoat Junction. In 1968, she appeared in the Season 1 finale of The Doris Day Show as Mrs. Loomis, a woman who accuses Billy of stealing $5.00 from her purse after she dropped it.
In 1972, she was the voice of Laurie Holiday on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, The Roman Holidays.
In 1994, Mitchell voiced the Sneetches, cousins, Thidwick's mother and Sue the Second Fish in Storybook Weaver and later in 2004, deluxe version in Storybook Weaver Deluxe.
In 2012, she voiced her guest star as Betty White in MAD episode, Betty White & the Huntsman / Ancient Greek Mythbusters.