Skip to content

Lucille Ball, Scrooge and Jughead appear in RDC’s Retro Radio Christmas Review

The stage show based on vintage radio plays opens on Nov. 23
9405303_web1_171116-RDA-M-171117-RDA-Lucille-Ball
Red Deer College’s Retro Radio Christmas Review is bringing an odd assortment of pop-culture characters to life on the Arts Centre stage, including comedian Lucille Ball. Photo by ADVOCATE news services

Red Deer College’s Retro Radio Christmas Review will bring an assortment of pop-culture characters to life on the Arts Centre stage starting on Nov. 23.

Wacky red-headed comedienne Lucille Ball will make an appearance — or at least a version of her will, as depicted by a student actor.

Lucy will be joined by Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, Dragnet’s Jack Webb, Father Knows Best’s Robert Young — and the Riverdale gang of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead as part of the nostalgic Christmas show.

RDC theatre instructor and the show’s director Tom Bradshaw describes the Review as family entertainment from a simpler era — when mom, dad and the kids would gather around the radio to listen to their favourite shows.

Because of the sentimentality factor, Bradshaw believes the older generation will get the biggest charge out of these five vintage plays, which will be performed much as they were back in the 1930s and ’40s.

Actors will read their lines into mics on a radio station set — with sound effects created in front of the live studio audience.

“Instead of parents bringing their kids to this one, perhaps grandparents should bring their grandkids!” Bradshaw suggested, with a chuckle.

The plays will be presented as two different evenings of theatre by a cast of 17 second-year students.

Although a one-hour version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol will be performed as the second act on each night of the Review, the first acts will switch between two sets of half-hour radio plays.

On certain nights it will be the Christmas episode from My Favourite Husband, starring Lucille Ball, in her pre-Desi Arnaz days. (She’s knitting a present for her hubby and botching it up as only Lucy can, said Bradshaw.)

The Lucy script will be paired with a Dragnet episode in which actor Jack Webb’s detective character looks for a Baby Jesus stolen from a church nativity scene.

On alternate evenings, RDC actors will present a Christmas script from the Archie Andrews radio series. Archie is doing some last minute gift shopping, only to discover his parents and friends are at the same store.

The Riverdale play will be joined by a seasonal episode of Father Knows Best — the one in which the family motors up the mountain to cut down a Christmas tree and gets stuck in the snow, said Bradshaw.

Each night’s performance will close with the 1939 radio version of A Christmas Carol with Lionel Barrymore playing Scrooge and Orson Welles as the narrator.

The RDC actors will have to find the “essence of Lucille Ball or Orson Welles,” so they aren’t doing impressions, but are still bringing these iconic actors to mind for the audience, he added.

Bradshaw believes it will be a funny, sentimental seasonal show — that might even bring a tear to your eye.

The Review runs to Dec. 2. For tickets, please contact the Black Knight Ticket Centre.



lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter