Saturday, April 16, 2011

The Wettest Beak


Catclaw associate Sherry Deatrick has a new play, The Wettest Beak, currently running at the Rudyard Kipling on Oak Street in Louisville, as part of the Finnigan Festival. The play is the third installment (and we hear there will be a fourth!) in her series that began with Beak Wet, Everybody! and followed by Beak Wetter.

As per our own Voraxical values, Deatrick's idiosyncratic style puts texture ahead of content and character development over story arc. To attempt description of the dadaistic goings-on would do the works an injustice; suffice it to say there's a mutant half-human-half-chicken and a swingin' UPS man who rock the boat for a family of eBay-obsessed apocalypse-minded hillbillies. Our pal George Bailey, who worked with us on A Day in the Life of Eddie Jester, Toulouse-inations and Patrick Amsterdam, did an outstanding job here, both as director and as actor, reprising his role as "Teensy".

The actors rarely stand still in a Deatrick play, tending to leap, swish, and gyrate endlessly like Charles Ludlam characters would be if they were spazzed out on crystal meth in a trailer in Floyd's Knobs. That being the case, almost all the photographs taken ended up in blur-o-vision. (But the actual play was blurry too.)















Thursday, April 7, 2011

Bits Of Beauty


From the JSH collection: Bits of Beauty magazine, November 1947. A delicious mix of Broadway showgirls, actresses, models and pin-up girls of the day.


Frances Vorne


Toni Seven


Mar-Shan


Dorothy Jordan


Earl Carroll's Charmers


Josetta Dore

Friday, April 1, 2011

Chop Chop


This half hour snippet of Grand Guignol grisly silliness comes from something called the Tragedies Theatre, and it's called Chop Chop. It seems to take place in Victorian times, and though several delightfully hammy thespians are here chewing up the scenery, the real star of the play is a gullotine.

View: The Tragedies Theatre du Grand Guignol - Chop Chop (YouTube)

Friday, February 18, 2011

The Guiding Light on Radio


There's plenty of old Guiding Light radio shows on YouTube, from the days before it was a television show. The soap operas have their origin in radio, and this example from 1941 is a classic of the genre, complete with commercials and a mail-in contest.

Listen: The Guiding Light, June 10 1941

Sunday, February 13, 2011

The Call of Cthulhu


I like audiobooks for the same reason I like radio dramas and staged readings of plays - one's imagination is forced to fill in the blanks and nothing is spoonfed to the mind. This audiobook version of H.P. Lovecraft's 1928 novella The Call of Cthulhu is read by Garrick Hagon, the guy who played Biggs Darklighter in Star Wars.

Read along with Biggs, using Project Gutenberg's text copy or you can download it as a free e-book at ManyBooks.

Listen: The Call of Cthulhu read by Garrick Hagon

Saturday, February 12, 2011

A Study in Scarlet


One can find online the entire 1933 movie of A Study in Scarlet starring Reginald Owen, but I'm strangely drawn to this 32-part YouTube posting of an audiobook version instead. It features John Tefler reading the original Arthur Conan Doyle story - the very first of the Sherlock Holmes tales - originally published in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual.

If you like to read along with an audiobook, as I do, then check out the full text of the book at Project Gutenberg. Dashed clever device, this internet, eh what? A click here and clack there and Bob's yer Uncle.


Listen: A Study in Scarlet audiobook

Friday, February 11, 2011