Harry & Edmund (Broome Stages)

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

has anyone heard, or seen, the recording of "broome stages"?

if not, and you are interested in how this story is, read before you see or hear. oh, maaan it was, how should i say, a story of generation after generation of a family's acting professionals. with a quite a few parts that will make you, well, it made me, anyway. it brought tears to my eyes. and when i got to the harry and edmund characters, i had to keep telling myself why i was reading the book to begin with.

orson welles, by the books, plays both in the radio version.

at first i was thinkin', 'well, just read his character's parts'

but then i would have not been able to understand the meaning of the story.

what is the meaning? i still don't know, but when, and if, i get the radio recording of this story, ooohhh boy.

it was a good book. 703 pages long. i kind of wonder how he did these things. how can anybody get a book that takes weeks to be read, into an hour long show. you'd have to be a genius to figure that out.

oh yeah. orsonwas a genius. so he had no problem. but i don't think anyone else could do it.

oh well. bye now.

[mteal]

Here's a review of the novel on the Net:
Long out of print, but you can almost always find a copy in secondhand bookstores. Clemence Dane was a playwright (A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT) and a contemporary of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, and she brings an insider's perception to this multigenerational saga of an English acting dynasty through the 18th and 19th centuries. The fun is that the family relationships of the brilliant bickering Broomes roughly parallel those of Henry II Plantagenet, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their famously squabbling offspring, whose name derived from the yellow wildflower called broom. (A sprig of broom, Planta Genista in Latin, appeared on the great seal of Richard I Lionheart.) The book was written in 1931 and certainly shows its age in the writing style, but if you love stories about the theatre and the people who love it and make it, this is a very special read.

[tonyw]

Dane was one of those British writers of the interwar period. Hitchcock adapted her play ENTER SIR JOHN with Sir John Menier one of her reoccuring characters in 1930. It was also filmed in a German versio with Alfred Abel re-titled MARY. Other writers such as Helen Simpson are long forgotten but were important figures in their time.

[mteal]

Thanks Tony. I didn't even know the book was written by a woman. Welles did not have that great a track record in adapting women authors, but there were several, including Edna Ferber (COME AND GET IT) and Charlotte Bronte (JANE EYRE). He also, according to Frank Brady's book, considered both HRR Richardson's fin-de-siecle story MAURICE GUEST and Zoe Akins's prison drama STARVATION ON RED RIVER as a followup to Kane. Later of course, he also tried to adapt several stories of Isak Dineson into films.

Curously, BROOME STAGES seems to be one of the few programs missing from the Mercury on the Air website. It is, however, available at the My Old Radio site - where for some reason it's called 48 Broome Stages - along with a lot of other good Welles radio programs:

http://www.myoldradio.com/old-radio-epi ... e-stages/1