b'ABOUTRADIO DRAMA When the radio was first developed, it brought entertainment into the home. Prior to radios for the home, families went out for entertainment to the theatre, movies, and museums. But with the new radio, families spent time gathered around the radio, listening to the news, music, and radio dramas broadcast daily. Radio drama is a form of audio storytelling broadcast on radio. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music, and sound effects to help the listener imagine the story. Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by Americas commercial radio stations:KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921.In February 1922, entire Broadway musicals with the original casts aired from WJZs Newark studios.Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed an entire play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922. Ed Kross in the 2009 production of Its a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!An important turning point in radio drama came when Schenectady, New Yorks WGY, after a successful tryout on August 3, 1922, began weekly studio broadcasts of full-length stage plays in September 1922, using music, sound effects and a regular troupe of actors, The WGY Players. The single best-known episode of radio drama is probably the Orson Welles-directed adaptation of The War of the Worlds (1938), which some listeners believed to be real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars. By the 1940s, it was a leading form of popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, radio drama lost some of its popularity. Radio drama has a minimal presence in the United States today. Much of American radio drama is restricted to podcasts or rebroadcasts ofprograms from previous Camille Robinson and Brandon Dahlquist in the 2018 production of Its adecades. However, radio drama remains popular in much Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!Photo by Michael Brosilow.of the world. 10AMERICAN BLUES THEATER(edited from Wikipedia.org)'