AboutFACE Ireland will take Dublin theatergoers back 75 years to the Golden Age of Radio with a fictionalized account of the making of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio production of A Christmas Carol.
Scripter Paul Nugent stars as Welles with Cillian O’Donnachadha as Joseph Cotten. Nugent’s play will have its world premiere in Dublin on Dec. 20-22.
The play is set on Christmas Eve 1938 at CBS Studio 1 in New York City, where Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air are set to perform ‘A Christmas Carol.’ but the mood is not jolly as lead actor Lionel Barrymore has taken ill.
Based on the description, the production plays loose with the historical facts with Cotten in the role of Bob Cratchit, and appearances by Agnes Moorehead, Arlene Francis and George Coulouris, who did not have lead roles in the radio production. Further, the production has Welles on the rampage and the cast exhausted during the Christmas Eve broadcast when the production really aired on December 23.
Nugent expressed a fascination with Welles in remarks reported by BroadwayWorld.
“By the end of 1938, at 23 years of age, Orson had become a huge radio and theater star in New York, and at this point was being closely watched by Hollywood, having meetings with studios, he was under a lot of pressure – part of which he put on himself because he was such a perfectionist – and he was living a crazy life, barely any sleep, running from theatre rehearsals to radio recordings to movie meetings,” Nugent said. “On Broadway, he was being called a genius for his Voodoo MacBeth set in Haiti and his Nazi Julius Caesar inspired by the Nuremberg rallies, while his radio version of War of the Worlds merely weeks before had people around the US believing Martians had landed. And he was 23! And I love his combination of bravado and ingenuity: Orson was so in demand as a radio star, including playing the voice of The Shadow, that in order to rush from the studios of CBS to NBC, he hired an ambulance, and sped through the Manhattan streets sirens blazing, having discovered there was no law requiring one to be injured to ride an ambulance! He’s such a fascinating man, and I think this young period in his life, when he was on the rise but before making Citizen Kane, is just a hugely intriguing time to look at his character.”
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