'Radio Gals' goes on air off-Broadway

By Gloria Cole

New York (UPI): Picture a down-home living room in a small southern town -- upright piano, ruffled lampshades, a Civil War rifle mounted on the wall.

Then imagine that the owner and resident of this living room conducts a daily radio show on a 500-watt station that fades in and out of earshot of her devoted listeners.

When a listener calls to complain he can't hear well, she merely advises everybody to join her in switching frequencies. "Altogether, a turn and a half to the right," the radio show lady says.

She's Hazel C. Hunt, the radio station of Cedar Ridge, Arkansas. In addition to her daily chitchat about lost dogs and neighbors who moved their mothers from the front to the back bedroom, she sells Horehound Compound, a laxative that is also good for removing weeds and stripping paint. In addition to all this, she brings on the Hazel-nuts, her all-girl band that sings, tap dances and plays a variety of instruments.

To anyone who saw the award-winning off-Broadway productions of Oil City Symphony and Pump Boys and Dinettes, the setting, tone and characters of Radio Gals conceived by the team of Michael Craver and the late Mark Hardwick are delightfully familiar.

The musical is currently playing the John Houseman Theater to sold-out audiences. Variety, the show business publication, said during its pre-New York run that the show is "magic in its loving recreation of America's musical past, sparkling with funny, romantic original tunes and talented, enthusiastic performances."

The excellent performances of the cast, headed by Carole Cook, can be directly attributed to the show's director-choreographer, Marcia Milgrom Dodge.

"We've stayed true to the script," Dodge said. "What I bring to it is that the whole thing should feel like a dance.

"We have great license because it's a radio show and its dual reality allows us to do more with every character constantly behaving and reacting," she said. "We didn't want the story to stop for the musical numbers as it would in a revue."

Trained as a dancer in her native Detroit, Dodge has choreographed many shows, but this is her New York debut as a director.

"The biggest challenge was to come up with the world of the play, for which I worked with the set designer, Narelle Sissons," she said.

"We were inspired by the thumbnail sketches Mark had done, and we did a lot of research to evoke Arkansas in the 1920s, and then we added to that the look of Grant Woods' painting, 'Dinner with Thresher,'" Dodge said.

She connected with Mike Craver when he was a member of the Red Clay Ramblers band, and she worked with the band for eight years. She will work with it again on her next project, Kudzu, which is being created by cartoonist Doug Marlette.

Even though the Arkansas setting of "Radio Gale" may seem politically fortuitous, the concept actually pre-dated Bill Clinton's election to the presidency.

"Mark Hardwick and I first got the idea in 1990," Craver said. "We toyed with it on and off for a year and then in 1991 we did a production of Oil City Symphony at the Arkansas Rep Theater in Little Rock. We fell in love with Arkansas then."

Encouraged by the theater's artistic director, Cliff Baker, Craver and Hardwick submitted Radio Gals to him and Baker wanted to schedule it for his next season.

In that production, Craver and Hardwick took on the roles of the elderly Swindle sisters because they didn't have time to find appropriate musician-actresses.

"During one performance, one of Mark's fake bosoms fell out while he was doing a dance step," Craver said. "He didn't miss a beat, kicking it back under the piano."

After Hardwick's death from AIDS, Craver suspended work on the show for a year and finally returned to it with the help of actress-writer Debra Monk. Eventually it went on tour and made its way to New York, where it has won unanimous critical acclaim.