I Wish More People Would Produce More Audio Drama - Here Are a Couple of How-To Resources

I do love the medium of radio drama, or, in these days when it is disappearing from radios in a lot of places, audio drama.   In this era of very inexpensive or even free but very sophisticated computer based multi-track recorders and editors and online publishing of audio, writers, actors and producers have a means of getting their work where it can be heard, no matter how sophisticated or how silly, how challenging or how main-stream, how well-done or how thrown-together.   The same is, of course, true for musicians who want to expose their work to an audience but who don't have the chance in traditional ways.   I wish we'd had these tools and media available to us when I was in my youth, just as I wish I'd had access to word processing and automated search for information.   For the life of me, I can't understand why so much of it is used for the stupidest of reasons except that people can be as much jaded by it as enabled by it.

I have read several things about making radio drama online, probably the most interesting of those is the book The Well-Tempered Audio Dramatist by the lateYuri Rasovsky, available for free from The National Audio Theater Festivals - you've got to give them an e-mail and identity to get the download of the book.  Yuri Rasovsky was well known for his work in radio drama, beginning about a decade after it pretty much disappeared from radio in the United States, he began two well known companies, The National Radio Theater of Chicago and, later Hollywood Theater of the Ear.  As Rasovsky predicted, some of the information about technology in his book might already be a bit old, does anyone still use DATs?  But much of it is still useful and instructive.  And a lot of the material deals with a professional level of production that you will only be able to approach, but the information is useful.  One of the things I liked reading was his praise of the former CBC production assistant Nina Callahan. a name I remember hearing in the credits for a number of things I remember fondly. 

There are many other how-to online books and sources.  Perhaps fitting, one of the better of those I found does it through audio,  The Audio Drama Production Podcast.  They run to a nearly a hundred episodes (maybe more by the time you find this post) talking among people with real experience of doing it.  

I will say that I find a lot of the new stuff is heavy on the sci-fi and fantasy genres or the far-out or wacky, which isn't my favorite but I've got nothing against it.  Radio is, as someone pointed out, the real and infinitely flexible theater of the mind, anything can be made to happen, the imagination of those doing it and their ability to convince you through sound and implication the only limits.  I'm just glad people are trying and some of them are trying and even succeeding with coming up with creative pieces.  If it will help to revive or inspire better stage drama, I have no idea though I doubt it could hurt.  It certainly might be a way for some new talent to get a chance to learn and be heard, it might also give some really good actors who will never look the part a chance to play roles they could never get if people could see them.   I like that about audio drama, the listener comes up with the visuals, the actors are relieved from the need to look like what some producer or director thinks they should look like.  And the sets and costumes always look right.  

And opera, if there is a group of performers who need to get experience which is way, way too expensive to get in a stage production, it's people who want to work in opera.  Imagine being freed of the expense, the make-up, the costumes, the sets.... Being able to wear comfortable clothes while you're singing a part.   I wish someone would do those operas you read about but which haven't been produced, or which you'll never get to hear.   I don't know if it's been done yet but I'd really like to hear George Whitefield Chadwick's The Padrone.   Even if they had to use electronics to play the score, or just a piano.  The production in your head might be a lot better than the one you'll almost certainly never get a chance to see.