Radio Recap: Great Scenes from Great Plays

It's been some time since I reviewed an old-time radio series that was a dramatic anthology other than a mystery/crime program. Here's a very unusual one: Great Scenes from Great Plays. The contents of the series are not really that remarkable - it opens with an adaptation of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and there are adaptations of familiar plays such as "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "A Doll's House." There are many radio versions of these plays.

Why Great Scenes from Great Plays stands out is that it is an example of dramatic religious programming! Indeed, it was created by the National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the performers were drawn from the Episcopal Actors Guild! The series aired on Mutual from October 1948 to February 1949 and because the Guild had some prestigious members it featured actors who were seldom heard in Mutual programming (Mutual didn't usually have the big budgets heard on CBS, NBC or ABC).

No doubt with the Cold War going on it was considered in the public good to promote the USA's religious freedom's - that probably helped get both this series and Family Theater (1947-1957) on Mutual. While Family Theater had Catholic origins, it promoted itself as a non-denominational program, simply promoting the concept of prayer to its listeners. By contrast, Great Scenes from Great Plays took time each week to encourage its listeners to attend church - and that if they were not affiliated with any church, to seek out their local Episcopal church. It's decidedly different and perhaps the reason its run was so much shorter than Family Theater is that it didn't conceal its denominational bias.

Walter Hampden hosted the series and occasionally performed in the plays as well; other performers included the likes of Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Ingrid Bergman, Cornel Wilde and Madeleine Carroll (presumably at least some of them claimed Episcopal church membership). Most of the episodes still exist and are in excellent sound quality, although the last 2 episodes are a bit warbly. Sadly, we're missing a Christmas episode which dramatized the Nativity - it's also the only episode that actually told a Bible story. But from the rest there's plenty of dramas to enjoy, such as Karloff's performance as Death as in "On Borrowed Time" or Rathbone in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street."

You can hear all of Great Scenes from Great Plays using this playlist on YouTube courtesy of the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group.