The CBS Radio Workshop debuted at the end of the Age of Classic Radio, which was a time of innovation and experimentation, especially in terms of radio drama. The ten-hour Volume 5 includes “Epitaphs”, from Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology (a collection of short, free-form poems), which starred Jeanette Nolan and Richard Crenna; Norman Dello Joio’s “Meditations On Ecclesiastes”), which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for music, conducted on the program by Alfredo Antonini; James Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up”, about a three-foot tall adult brought into a baseball game to take a walk (inspiring the 1951 stunt by Bill Veeck); Robert Heinlein co-adapted his short story “The Green Hills of Earth”, about an old, blind space traveler who wants to die on the planet of his birth, Earth; Edgar Allan Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”, a satirical attack on transcendentalism; an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus”, from the collection of the same name; Richard Durham’s “Sweet Cherries In Charleston”, which tells the story of the aborted 1822 slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina; an adaptation of “Young Man Axelbrod” by Sinclair Lewis, a critic of American society (particularly capitalism) who is probably best remembered for It Can’t Happen Here, about the election of a Fascist as the American president, based on the populist Southern politician Huey Long.

 

The man behind CBS Radio Workshop, which debuted in 1956, was William Froug. Inspired directly by the work of Norman Corwin on the original Columbia Workshop, Froug put all the pieces together to produce a program that took the best of what had come before it and succeeded even further in production, performance and storytelling.

 

CBS Radio Workshop not only continued to push boundaries in terms of utilizing story, music, voice and more in exciting, modern ways, it broke new ground in radio drama. In short, the CBS Radio Workshop set the standard for modern audio drama.

 

Blending sound effects with story, music with voice, and quality with substance, the episodes on CBS Radio Workshop, Volume 5 shows how boundless storytelling can be with audio drama.