Cabin Fever Players’ sly drama, the vintage “Radio Show” from the golden age of radio, wraps up Friday evening, August 16, after three performances on the stage at Lake City Arts’ Mary Stigall Theater.
The play is directed by Jodi Linsey who multi-tasks as not only director but also stage sound effects.
Based on the clever standup dialogue of radio shows from the 1940s and 50s — complete with advertisements for luxurious hair balm and other must-haves of the period, each of the actors recites their lines with gusto. Not all of the dialogue is comedy, although deadpan Donny Rightsell and elastic-faced Brian Poet deliver standout performances reciting Abbott and Costello’s hilarious “Who’s on First” exchange.
Rightsell, a director of Lake City Arts, is a mainstay in this summer’s Arts’ performances, first for his vocals in the 1960’s pageant “Still Feelin’ Groovy” earlier this summer and now stellar in both drama and comedy dialogue for “Radio Show.” In Addition to “Who’s on First?” Rightsell’s deadpan dialogue is at once nuanced and menacing as General Zaroff opposite Poet in “Most Dangerous Game.”
Charming to Lake City audiences is the three-woman combo composed of chatty Jane, played by 1940s-quaffed Melanie Merrill, with wide-eyed ingenue Ava Wingard in the role of Irma in the ghostly comic dialogue “My Friend Jane”. Other memorable performances in “Jane” are supplied by Camille Richard with bright Irish brogue as landlord Mrs. O’Riley, Rightsell as the Maestro, Bill Goodwin as Irma’s humorless boss, and deep-voiced, mustachioed Celeste Scott in her departing role as the announcer. In a typical exchange between Wingard’s naive Irma and her law office boss, sternly played by the unsmiling Goodwin, Goodwin dismisses a ghostly sighting as “Nothing but an apparition,” Wingard’s Irma in return observing “well, that’s just ridiculous…none of us have ever had surgery!”
Also, memorable and laugh-laden are Melanie Merrill and Goodwin in their roles as Liz and George Cooper in “My Favorite Husband,” Celeste Scott returning as the intently stern policeman.
