Classic Radio Gets New Wrinkle in ‘Twinkle’

It’s all business and grim reality at the Washington Mutual Bank building at Sunset and Vine (metal detectors, buzz-in doors). You’d never know that one floor below exists a benign chunk of Hollywood history.

Located in the basement, the Pioneer Broadcasters Club Room is the site of the old NBC radio recording studios, a working remnant of a time when a twist of the radio dial meant a daily supply of westerns, dramas, mysteries, science fiction, comedies and soap operas.

Old-time microphones still stand on a small stage, a dim “on the air” sign hangs over a glass-windowed sound control room, myriad photographs of past radio personalities line the walls and here and there are vintage gramophones and radios.

But on this sunny summer day, radio theater is more than a memory. On the stage, at the piano, on battered folding chairs and well-worn sofas, is a host of veterans of radio’s heyday (from the 1930s to the early 1950s) and other long-historied actors of the stage, TV and film. They’re here not for old times’ sake, but to work.

The respected California Artists Radio Theatre company is rehearsing “Twinkle! Twinkle!,” an ambitious musical by actor-director Richard Erdman and jazz composer Don Piestrup, premiering live on Saturday at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Cinegrill.

It’s a convergence of past and present: The new musical, with its hint of bittersweet, Sondheim-esque flavor, echoes the lives of those who will perform it, mostly actors in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

The characters are former “almost” stars, said Erdman, a salty and energetic 76. They represent the working actors with recognizable faces and voices, but elusive names, whose careers shifted, as the years passed, to TV series spots, commercials, cartoon voice-overs and regional theater.

“It’s our story, too,” he said. “I’ve been lucky enough to be a fairly successful character actor, and suddenly here I am, getting along, no great market for people my age.... This is a show about staying alive.”

Erdman’s 50-year career began “in the old so-called golden years, when I was a contract player at Warner Bros.” (Many remember him as Hoffy in “Stalag 17.”) His ups and downs and memories of actor friends now gone provided the spark for the musical’s book: an ex-actress seeks to restore a crumbling Beverly Hills mansion, the site of wild celebrity bashes long ago, to turn it into a “haven for hopefuls.” The mansion, however, is haunted by the spirits of Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis and James Cagney.

“Bogart--that was cool,” laughed Don Piestrup, a noted commercial composer and jazz arranger for Buddy Rich and others. He had a terrific time with the music, he said, creating a subtly “spooky motif through the entire thing,” and allowing his jazz influences to “creep in” the synthesized, fully orchestrated score, “because it came from my past, and that’s what this is about.”

The score will be prerecorded, with music performed by David Loeb, a noted pianist and musical director for stage and film.

While the show will be performed and recorded before a live audience, it reflects radio’s limitless casting possibilities. Actor Alan Oppenheimer, 69, plays one ghost--”I’ve been doing Bogart since I was 16”--and the actress’ 40-year-old son, too. Leslie Easterbrook, 20 years his junior, plays Mom. (Easterbrook, a busy musical stage and voice-over artist, was the sexy blond police sergeant in the “Police Academy” comedies.)

Lyric tenor Bruce Ekstut, in his 40s, is her teenage grandson; his girlfriend is played by old-time radio star Janet Waldo, famous as spirited teenager Corliss Archer in the late 1930s and ‘40s. Others among the eclectic cast are Marvin Kaplan, William Windom, Linda Henning and Beverly Garland.

“You don’t have to look like Gary Cooper to play [him],” noted 31-year-old comedian and voice-over artist Sean Donellan, who plays that role in the musical. “You can play people you could never be as an actor in a visual sense. It gives you a lot of freedom.”

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“It’s a pity that radio drama isn’t bigger,” Erdman said, “because look how many actors could play parts they could never play on film. We get to do things we’ve wanted to do all our lives.”

Under the guidance of founder, director and producer Peggy Webber, CART has won national and international radio theater awards for many of its more than 100 shows, including a double Gold award from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting for “Macbeth,” starring David Warner and the late Jeanette Nolan, 48 years after Webber played Lady Macduff in Orson Welles’ film version of the play. Others among CART’s large company are Samantha Eggar, Shelley Long, Michael York, JoAnne Worley, Kathleen Freeman and members of England’s National and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre.

Webber, herself a veteran of thousands of shows from radio’s heyday, is very much at home in this basement studio. From 1943 to 1952, she played innumerable roles here, old and young.

“I would come in at 5 in the morning and we’d work until 2 the next morning. I’d fall in bed for a couple of hours and then come back. I never saw the daylight for about 10 years.”

Los Angeles residents can’t catch local broadcasts of CART’s shows--which range from Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” to radio classics by Norman Corwin, original plays, and adaptations of James Joyce, Shakespeare and Shaw. Although CART recently signed with the national Publishing Mills Audio Books, and its shows are available through its Web site, it was dropped from its regular public radio spot on KPCC-FM’s schedule. (L.A. Theatre Works’ lauded “The Play’s the Thing” series met a similar fate at KCRW-FM.)

National Public Radio still “sends us out,” said Webber. “I get phone calls and letters from all over the country. When we did our Fourth of July show, they were broadcasting us all over the world. I know the trend in public radio is to cut spoken word and drama, but we should have an audience in Los Angeles.” She optimistically looks toward “a future in the Internet and in satellite transmissions.”

Meanwhile, “Twinkle! Twinkle!” turns out to have one other past-meets-present layer: Legend has it that the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is haunted by Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.

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“Twinkle! Twinkle!,” Cinegrill, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd., Saturday at 1:30 p.m.; Sunday at 1:30 and 7 p.m. $20. (213) 683-3422; https://www.calartistsradiotheatre.org.