Word: guilds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...doubt that anybody ever had a better sponsor," says Armina Marshall. "He always leaves us alone." The hands-off sponsor is U.S. Steel, and the left-alone show is Theatre Guild on the Air (Sun. 8:30 p.m., NBC). Last week the Guild gave its 300th radio performance: a typically smooth and professional playing of Shaw's Man and Superman, starring Deborah Kerr and Maurice Evans. As executive director of the radio Guild, fiftyish Armina Marshall concentrates on "bringing the theater into U.S. homes." Unlike the Lux Radio Theater, which broadcasts dramatizations of movies, the Guild usually draws...
...happy relation with the sponsor is not the only unusual thing about Theatre Guild. Though the show costs $12,500 a week, the Guild nets only a relatively small profit, because "we spend a lot of money to keep our standards high." There are three days of rehearsal for each show, more rehearsal time than is used for any other radio program, and as much as is used on many TV shows. Whenever possible, the original stage casts are used on the air. In some cases, as with The Winslow Boy, a play goes on radio soon after it concludes...
...eight years on radio, the show has had remarkably few letters complaining of its plays or the political backgrounds of its casts ("We just forward those letters to U.S. Steel and they answer them"). The biggest furor occurred when the Guild presented Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke on an Easter Sunday. "It was bad timing." concedes Armina Marshall, "because the girl in the play becomes a prostitute. Ever since then on Easter Sunday we try to do a classic." About a dozen plays have been repeated (e.g., Three Men on a Horse, Little Women, Reflected Glory). The biggest audiences...
...years ago the Guild experimentally did a series of plays on NBC's television network, but it was agreed that "TV wasn't ready for us, and we weren't ready for them." Plans are now set for the Guild to try TV again this fall. "The only thing to be decided is who will sponsor the show," says Armina. And she adds, warmly: "We all hope it's going to be U.S. Steel...
Giannini's Shrew was a joint enterprise for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the city's Music-Drama Guild, whose singers sang without pay. Shrew Katharina was sung by Dorothy Short, an insurance agent, Husband Petruchio by Robert Kircher, a professional trombone player. "The important thing," said Symphony Conductor Thor Johnson, "was to give all segments of the community a chance to take part...