Aliens from space will be invading Bayonne for the second time in a year when Town Center Corporation holds its War of the Worlds night on June 24.
While residents who drag their lawn chairs out to City Parking Lot #3 won’t get to see Tom Cruise’s pretty face or a special effects destruction of the Bayonne Bridge, they will get to witness a live rendition of the 1938 Orson Wells radio broadcast that scared half the state into believing New Jersey had become the target of evil aliens from Mars bent on taking over the earth followed by the 1953 film rendition that has these Martins landing in Los Angeles instead with space ships instead of surfboards but a desperate need of tans.
According to Cedar Knolls-based MediaBay, which, holds the exclusive rights to the original broadcast of the live radio adaptation as performed by Orson Welles in 1938, the show aired on CBS Radio’s Mercury Theatre on the Air on October 30, 1938.
The live show is expected to kick off at some point after 8 p.m. Radioland Theatre is not a professional performance company in the traditional sense of the word. Most have day jobs – or at least careers they are pursuing.
Ross London, one of the two co-founders, served in Hoboken as a municipal judge, and will soon become a professor law. Others work similar kinds of jobs, although have a warm place in their hearts for performance.
“One is a retired school administrator, another is an AIDS Counselor, Shelly Miller once ran for city council in Hoboken,” London said.
“Nearly all the members live in or around Hudson County, and their performances are free of charge to senior citizens and civic groups.
“We’re not professional actors,” London said. “We’re involved in theater for love of theater.”
Theatre recreates classic 1930’s and 40’s radio drama, suspense, sci-fi, and comedy – complete with live sound effects, period music and vintage costumes. Shows include The Shadow, The Life of Riley, The Bickersons, Abbott and Costello and a host of others.
“One of the reasons wanted to do this type of thing is that we all have busy lives and have no time to memorize lines,” London said.
Radioland Theatre, the brainchild of Ross London and Catharine Baldwin, teacher at the Hudson School, is Hudson County’s first theatre group devoted to old-time radio performances.
London, a founder of Hudson Theatre Ensemble, a repertory theatre in Hoboken, is an enthusiastic promoter of old-time radio.
“Some of the best writing and acting talent in show business went into radio dramas. Its great story-telling and great fun- and we’ve got some of the area’s best actors involved,” he said.
London and Baldwin started the group about four years ago.
“We wanted to create a type of readers’ theater to do classics, something that would not require a lot of rehearsals,” he said. “We also wanted to use real people not professional actors.”
They looked at lot of material, Shakespeare and such, but didn’t come up with what they wanted until they got the idea of doing radio scripts.
“We looked them up on the internet and found dozens of old fashioned radio shows including The Shadow, science fiction, comedies,” London said.
This was exactly the kind of thing they had in mind, and also had the added advantage of allowing them to dress up in period costumes.
Although they are a regular act in a senior center in Jersey City and another in Bayonne, they didn’t start in a senior center. They did their performance in a popular bar in Jersey City, on a warm September just when the baseball playoffs started. The air conditioning didn’t work and people at the bar screamed at the TV broadcast of the baseball game through most of the performance.
“Then Catherine got the idea of looking for an audience that would be a little more attentive,” he said.
Many seniors still have a living memory of radio drama and that gave the group an audience.
Finding scripts is often a problem despite the fact that during the heyday radio broadcast tens of thousands of shows. Most of these were preserved in recording and if there are scripts they are in private hands or other inaccessible locations.
“But we’re always looking out for additional material,” London said.
They are also looking for a corporate sponsor that can allow them to continue providing these shows for free.
The group has a membership of about 15 people, although scheduling is often an issue so that each show often uses about seven or eight people. A performance includes sound effects as well as musical interludes.
“We have some very good singers,” he said.
This will be the first time the group has tackled War of the Worlds, but it has been adapted for the occasion. London called it a parody that will last from 20 to 30 minutes and will be presented prior to the film at about 8:30 p.m. on June 24.
“The actual script was fairly long and complex and had to boil it down and fairly short piece,” he said. “This was the challenge of the script writer. The novelty of War of the Worlds is that people thought it was a radio broadcast that was actually being interrupted. It played havoc with people’s imagination. When you put something on the stage it is pretty obvious what’s going.”
