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JANUARY, 19 3 0
11
on Radio
By HERBERT DEVINS
CONSIDER the actor. He needs consideration — in radio. The lowliest trouper on the three-a-day dreams some day to see his name in electric lights on Broadway. This is something tangible and real: the flashing lights that spell his name can be looked at and remembered.
But then his radio struggle is just beginning. The climax of his stage career is just the starting signal for offers from the radio studios. And this way leads to despair.
For here there are no blinding lights to remind the audience who plays the part. Just a simple announcement of the actor's name, slid gently through a gleaming disc to disappear forever into the blackness of the night — like trying to write his name in water, or the forgetful sand.
Consider the actor's plight. He hopes to win a nationwide audience with only one performance — and every performance is a "first night" on radio. There are no runs and no printed programs to be taken home for remembrance. The show does not go on before packed houses brought there by the enthusiasm of previous audiences. Just one brief hour or less in a single evening that is crowded with other features, all clamoring for a chance to impress their own particular message upon the listener's memory and few actually doing so.
And yet consider the actor's hope. He knows that this same forgetful microphone is the avenue to greater audiences in a single night than can be crowded into a Broadway playhouse in a year's successful run. Harvey Hays
Consider the Actor :
Every Show a
First Night
The Famous Balcony Scene from "Romeo and
Julie f as played recently over the air by Eva
Le Galliennc and Donald Cameron
No wonder he thirsts for just the chance to try his skill in winning this wayward host of slipper-clad, comfortable stay-at-homes. They're all human, he knows, and subject to the same emotions at their firesides that they experience in any theater. Perhaps he may be able to touch the secret spring that enables his voice to wring their hearts.
And if he wins — what need then of electric lights down a side street off Broadway? Then the greatest audience in the world will be his — and ten million Americans can't be wrong.
Every actor feels that no one yet has realized the full possibilities of radio. There have been several major triumphs, it is true, but even the heroes and heroines of these shiver to think of their fate had they not earned the right to follow up their advantage in further broadcasts.
Shipwreck Tale Enjoyed
Already the dramatic studios of the NBC in New York have their legends of signal triumphs. Perhaps the greatest of these was scored by one who is not even an actor — "Red" Christiansen, the hero of the famous Galapagos broadcast, which radio listeners demand to hear repeated at least once every year. He was the sole survivor of a shipwreck on the Galapagos Islands, and recreates his Robinson Crusoe adventures in intensely dramatic style.
Another ray of hope to the despairing radio actor is the success of Rosaline Greene, Eveready's leading lady,