CNN says its June 7 broadcast of George Clooney’s play “Good Night, and Good Luck” will be a first for television: Never before has a play been broadcast on TV while being performed live on stage.
CNN’s broadcast brings to mind a similar first on the American stage, but more than a century earlier: the first live theater production presented on radio, on Jan. 9, 1923, with a broadcast of Don Marquis’s hit Prohibition-era comedy “The Old Soak” from the stage of Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre (today’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre).
Harry Beresford as Clem Hawley in ‘The Old Soak’ at the Plymouth Theatre.
Presented on the WJZ radio program “Broacasting Broadway,” with host Bertha Brainard, the remote broadcast was a technological marvel in the earliest days of commercial radio. A microphone was hung from the stage’s proscenium arch, with a dedicated telephone line connecting the Plymouth Theatre with engineers at radio station WJZ in Newark, New Jersey. (WJZ was a Westinghouse station at the time. A few weeks after the broadcast, the station was sold to RCA and moved to New York City.)
The broadcast was a critical success. Broadway producers had worried that a radio broadcast might keep theater-goers at home, but the opposite happened: The next day, several customers were heard telling Plymouth Theatre box office workers that they were motivated by the witty dialog – and loud applause – they heard on their home radio sets.
The remote broadcast was the idea of radio host Bertha Brainard, who quickly lined up additional Broadway shows for performances over the airwaves. Within a year, Brainard was WJZ’s assistant program manager, and three years later she was program manager. She would become one of the most powerful executives in radio.
‘The Old Soak’ theater program cover
“The Old Soak” was in its twenty-first week at the Plymouth Theatre at the time of the radio broadcast. It had opened on Aug. 22, 1922, and went on to run a full year on Broadway – 421 performances – before embarking on three simultaneous nationwide tours. The show told the boozy adventures of Clem Hawley, a character Marquis created in 1914 in his daily Sun Dial column in The (New York) Evening Sun.
Hawley was a lovable reprobate who used fractured Bible verses and rum-soaked logic to bemoan the Prohibition movement in America, and the character only became more popular when Prohibition became the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 – the nation’s misguided “18th commandment” in Hawley’s words.
Marquis’s publisher, Doubleday, released a popular collection of Clem Hawley stories in 1921, “The Old Soak and Hail and Farewell,” with the Broadway production appearing the following year. The play would later form the foundation of two Hollywood movies, “The Old Soak” in 1926, and “Good Old Soak” in 1937.
The play had a corny and predictable plot — lazy, good-for-nothing husband leaves home in disgrace after the family’s savings disappear, then confronts the real villain and saves the day — but critics applauded Marquis’ deft writing. Alexander Woollcott in The New York Times called the play “gorgeously entertaining,” and Burns Mantle of the Evening Mail named “The Old Soak” one of the top ten productions of the 1922-23 season.
Clem Hawley, Mantle said, was “representative of all the genial alcoholics, all the winning failures, all the domestic derelicts with weak characters but good hearts, who have both blessed and infested the world from the days of Bacchus to those of Volstead.”
Robert O’Connor as Al, the bootlegger; Harry Beresford as Clem Hawley; and Eva Williams as Nelly, the hired girl, in ‘The Old Soak’ at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre, 1922-23
A depiction of how theater shows were transmitted via Bertha Brainard’s “Broadcasting Broadway” radio show in 1923. The microphone has been moved from the proscenium arch, used in ‘The Old Soak,’ to hidden locations on the stage.
