1945–1953 · ABC, then NBC
Theatre Guild on the Air
The Theatre Guild put its Broadway productions on the air with the stage casts intact — an hour a week, sponsored by United States Steel.
23 broadcasts
Planet Vintage presents
Broadwayon the Air
For twenty years the American theatre had a second stage: a microphone in a broadcast studio, an orchestra behind a screen and an hour of network time. The Theatre Guild put its own Broadway productions on the air with the stage casts intact. The Railroad Hour compressed whole musicals into half an hour. The Columbia Workshop threw the stage out entirely and invented something new.
779
Broadcasts
13
Series
411h
Of audio
1903–1954
Years covered
The stage, restaged
Plays and musicals carried from the theatre to the microphone
A point of honesty: with vanishingly few exceptions, nobody recorded a play from inside a Broadway house before 1950. What survives is the remount — the same company, the same script, performed again for radio. That is what these six series are, and it is still the only recorded evidence of how much of that theatre sounded.
1930–1949 · NBC, CBS, Mutual
The First Nighter Program
Radio's longest-running pretend playhouse: an usher, a curtain, three acts and a fictional address off Times Square.
40 broadcasts
1948–1954 · ABC, then NBC
The Railroad Hour
Gordon MacRae singing operetta and musical comedy — Naughty Marietta to Oklahoma! — in thirty-minute adaptations.
100 broadcasts
1938–1940 · CBS
The Campbell Playhouse
The Mercury company after Campbell's Soup arrived: bigger stars, a weekly guest, and the same director.
65 broadcasts
1938 · CBS
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
The unsponsored summer series that ended with the most famous hour in broadcasting.
19 broadcasts
1936–1947 · CBS
The Columbia Workshop
No sponsor, no format — an hour a week to find out what the medium could actually do.
333 broadcasts
Written for the microphone
Drama that could not have existed on a stage
The other half of the story. Once writers stopped adapting the theatre and started writing for sound, radio produced work with no stage equivalent at all — Cooper and Oboler in the dark, and Norman Corwin writing verse for sixty million people.
1935–1947 · NBC
Lights Out
Wyllis Cooper's midnight horror series, taken over and made notorious by Arch Oboler.
71 broadcasts
1947–1949 · Mutual, then ABC
Quiet, Please
Wyllis Cooper writing every script and Ernest Chappell speaking almost all of them, directly to you.
91 broadcasts
1941–1945 · CBS and combined networks
Norman Corwin
Three landmark broadcasts by the writer radio produced instead of a national theatre.
3 broadcasts
The stage elsewhere
Toronto, and the national theatre that was made of sound
Andrew Allan’s CBC Stage did for Canada what the Theatre Guild did for New York, and almost none of it can be heard: Library and Archives Canada holds the run under restricted terms. These are the broadcasts that reached the public domain — all of them.
1946–1949 · CBC Trans-Canada Network
CBC Stage, Toronto
Three surviving broadcasts from CBC Stage, the Toronto drama series that gave Canada a national theatre it could not otherwise afford.
3 broadcasts
Voices of the stage, 1903–1938
Before the microphone reached the theatre, the theatre came to the horn
Not broadcasts — discs. Three and a half minutes at a time, the great stage actors of London, New York and Paris were brought into a studio and asked for the speech they were famous for. Sarah Bernhardt in 1903, Ellen Terry at sixty-four, Beerbohm Tree’s Falstaff, the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française in the parts they played at the Salle Richelieu. It is the only recorded evidence of how that theatre sounded.
1906–1935 · Gramophone Company, Victor
The English Stage on Disc
Ellen Terry, Beerbohm Tree, John Barrymore, Sothern and Marlowe, Henry Ainley — the last generation of the great romantic actors, caught on shellac.
12 broadcasts
1903–1930 · Gramophone, La Voix de son Maître
Bernhardt and the French Tragedians
Sarah Bernhardt's Phèdre and La Samaritaine of 1903, Segond-Weber's Racine, Sacha Guitry and the French art of recitation.
8 broadcasts
1929–1938 · His Master's Voice, Lumen, Selmer
The Comédie-Française on Record
Molière, Racine and Rostand as played by the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française between the wars.
11 broadcasts
Provenance
Every broadcast on these pages is a surviving transmission held by the Internet Archive and in the public domain. Titles, air dates and durations are taken from the archives’ own metadata; where a date could not be established from the source we leave it undated rather than guess. Series covers are set here in period type — no original playbill or network artwork survives in the public domain for most of these programmes, and we do not invent one.