WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Nice article on Welles as The Shadow:
http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/orso ... hadow.html

Here is Wiki's complete list of Shadow episodes, from 1937 to 1954:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_T ... w_episodes

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Summer 1934 - Woodstock Theater Festival (OW's debut as actor/director, playing Svengali)

Fall 1934 - Welles returns to New York and continues with Katherine Cornell's Romeo and Juliet on Broadway, while getting bit parts on The March of Time radio program.

December - Welles gets married to Virginia Nicholson

March 1935 - Welles meets John Houseman and quits the Cornell company to take the lead in a small, off-Broadway production of Archibald MacLiesh's Panic

Summer 1935 - Welles and his new bride return to her hometown of Wheaton, IL and Welles is offered a job in a corporation, which he refuses. The couple return to New York.

October 1935 - Houseman hires Welles to direct the Negro Theater Unit

April 1936 - Voodoo Macbeth

Sept 1936 - Horse Eats Hat

January 1937 - Dr. Faustus

June 1937 - Cradle Will Rock

July 1937 - Les Miserables

September 1937 - Welles's run as The Shadow begins

November 1937 - Caesar

January 1st 1938 - Shoemaker's Holiday

March 1938 - Welles's first daughter Christopher is born

April 1938 - Heartbreak House

July 1938 - Mercury Theater on the Air

August 1938 - Too Much Johnson (trial run)

September 1938 - Welles's run as The Shadow ends

October 1938 - WOTW

According to the Wiki page on Welles's radio credits,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Wel ... io_credits
he played the Shadow 52 times, from September 26, 1937 to September 18th, 1938, a little over a month before the War of the Worlds broadcast.

From Facebook:

Sam:
I’m sitting to lunch playing an episode of the Shadow. It got me wondering, who is your favorite Shadow actor? Personally I pick Brett Morrison.

Davey:
Hands down Orson Welles, and not just because he sounded great, but because the run of plots during his stint were much more adventurous, unlike the crime syndicate plots and fake ghosts lurking the halls of many a mansions or psycho ward, etc. etc. after he left.

Sam:
I pick Welles as my least favorite. All the others could get the laugh Right and didn’t have to rely on a recording like he did and sometimes I feel like his tendency not to rehearse comes through in a somewhat stiffer performance, although I will agree the early plots were better.

Barry:
I agree with everything you wrote but I still think Orson is head and shoulders the best, due in large part to better writing in his era, greater mental powers that later Shadows never displayed, and Orson embodying the role perfectly. No one else sounded close to a bored playboy dilettante like he did.

David:
Most definitely Orson Wells. His Cranston/Shadow was the most mysterious and the show had a dark flavor that I really liked. I like all of them but, to me, Wells is the Shadow.

After hearing the Lilly Library recordings and hearing how a good disc transfer should sound it's made me realise just how woefully poor the Shadow recordings are. Even the ones I've heard that are from Radio Spirits sound like they've been transferred from the reel-to-reel tapes that otr traders circulated decades ago, and all those tapes ran at 3 3/4 ips which would explain the limited frequency range. I'd love to hear some that are transferred straight from the discs without any funny business.