I rather like Orson Welles. Some years ago you may recall I wrote a series of blog posts I titled "Jack Benny Without Jack Benny" in which I looked the episodes of Jack Benny Program in which Orson Welles filled in for a sick Jack Benny in the spring of 1943. Those programs worked out marvelously well, as Welles fitted into Jack's role very smoothly. Of course, as I reflected then, it helped that the Jack Benny Program was a well-honed machine and Welles was being supported by Benny's usual supporting players and by Benny's writers (Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow), in fact by the writing team I consider Benny's finest. These caveats aside, there was no guarantee that Welles could substitute for a seasoned comedian like Jack Benny, but he did and did it quite well (You can revisit my Jack Benny Without Jack Benny blogging series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6).
In the fall of 1943, Welles didn't have a regular radio program; he was the star of Suspense for a solid month of great performances, but mostly his radio appearances were confined to guest performances. Most of his time in the fall seems to have been spent touring his Mercury Wonder Show, a traveling magic show he performed for servicemen. He also took the romantic lead in the movie Jane Eyre; for a man whose early career had been one controversy after another (many of them intentionally courting controversy), the Orson Welles of late 1943 seemed like a pretty conventional Hollywood movie star - saluting servicemen, cracking jokes with Bing Crosby and appearing on screen in a popular melodrama. But in January, 1944, Welles had a brand-new radio series with many of his Mercury Theater regulars. It was called the Orson Welles Radio Almanac - and it was a comedy-variety program.
The Orson Welles Radio Almanac aired for 7 months over CBS from January-July, 1944. The series was sponsored by Mobilgas, who had previously sponsored Information, Please, suggesting someone at that company wanted to promote highbrow programming on the radio. And the series was a bit highbrow as in-between the comedy sketches and musical numbers (most of the series music was directed by Lud Gluskin of Suspense; it also benefited from appearances by the All-Star Jazz Group) Welles would close many episodes by reading a soliloquy from Shakespeare.
Apparently Orson had been building toward the Orson Welles Radio Almanac ever since his guest host duties on the Jack Benny Program. He had indeed gone over very well as a comedian and he'd done well for CBS over the years. He worked some of his performances on the Mercury Wonder program into his new series. You might think a dramatic performer such as Orson Welles would be an odd fit for a comedy-variety program. You'd be correct.
If you are well-versed in Orson Welles' performances then you know that Orson the guest performer and Orson the lead performer are two very different animals. When Orson made guest appearances on Jack Benny or Bing Crosby, he was reading off scripts built by those programs' tested and true methods. Even if he flubbed a few lines (and Orson being averse to rehearsals, he inevitably flubbed lines) the lead performers would keep the show on track. Even when he subbed for Jack Benny, he was still being guided by personalities like Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Don Wilson and Mary Livingstone, who all knew how to keep the comedic energy going.
By contrast, you can sample any of the comedic performances Orson directed on the Mercury Theater on the Air, the Campbell Playhouse or any of his other Mercury programs. At best, they're patchy. I think Orson had pretty chops as a comedy performer but not as a comedy producer.
Throughout, the Orson Welles Radio Almanac demonstrated Orson was not quite right as a comedic lead. There are a lot of flubs in the programs, mostly caused by Orson. You'll never wonder whether a line was flubbed or not as Orson tended to draw attention to them, whether he or a co-star were responsible. Orson was always a bit crabby and perfectionist and it really comes out in the sheer number of times he botched a joke in his delivery, bemoaned a co-star for flubbing their line or fired a few shots at his writers for giving him inferior material to read.
Easily the oddest part for me listening to the Orson Welles Radio Almanac was the commercial spot in the first broadcast, which was read by Ray Collins of the Mercury Theater. In an attempt to contrast other radio comedies who had commercial pitchmen that were ridiculously enthusiastic about the sponsor's product (Don Wilson, Bill Goodwin, Harlow Wilcox), Collins' pitchman character is extremely reluctant to talk about the sponsor's product and keeps missing Orson's hints that he should start pitching the product. It's different, and it doesn't work; it's so off-kilter, it actually sounds like Collins was trying to sabotage the sponsor. Perhaps Mobilgas thought so too, because Collins was kicked off the show by the following week and replaced by Jack Mather.
For the first month there were many gags about Orson being edited by the network censor. There were joks about Orson's fan club who swooned over him as though he were Frank Sinatra. Agnes Moorehead appeared for the first few months as Orson's secretary. Many of the gags could have been told on any other comedy show; the frequent jokes about how thin Frank Sinatra was certainly sound just like every other 1944 comedy show, but that same joke would appear every week.
Is the series a trainwreck? No. The frequent flubs and poor production decisions bring it down, but Orson was aided by relying heavily on guest stars. The likes of Groucho Marx, Dennis Day, Lucille Ball, Ann Southern and Robert Benchley all knew how to handle themselves on a radio comedy show and they did their best to keep the laughs coming. A few seasoned radio voices turned up to support Orson like John Brown, Walter Tetley and Hans Conreid.
There's also one episode that I think is a pretty great radio comedy. The June 14, 1944 episode is an episode-long sketch that satirizes Hitler through a fake war between Texas and Arkansas. Barton Yarborough turns up in his best southern drawl and the Hitler figure is performed by Cliff Nazarro, a frequent voice heard on the Jack Benny Program. And if you're a Suspense fan, you'll really enjoy Orson performing in a satire of his role in the two-part "Donovan's Brain" which appeared in the May 31, 1944 episode (just after the two-parter aired).
Most of the Orson Welles Radio Almanaac has survived. It's not great comedy-variety programming, but if you don't mind a little bit of cringe, you might enjoy it. You can hear the surviving episodes of the Orson Welles Radio Almanac on the Internet Archive split over two pages, the first part here, the remainder here.
Another post about an unlikely radio comedian follows tomorrow...
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