What happens
Fred Allen hosts an episode of his Town Hall program in which a series of comic interviews unfolds. A theater promoter describes the desperate summer of his touring Shakespeare company, a performer recounts a bus that kept interrupting a stage production, and a resort owner tells of his troubled summer theater. Later, a guide named Ray Smith joins Allen to talk about trout fishing and bear hunting, and the Town Hall Quartet sings. Musical numbers and commercial breaks are woven between the sketches. The episode is a 1938 broadcast of the Fred Allen series, with Fred Allen, Portland Hoffa, Kenny Delmar and Minerva Pious among the cast.
The Town Hall radio studio, with comic sketches set in a Jersey summer theater, a theater on a bus terminal stage, a Catskills resort, and the woods around Phoenicia, New York.
Characters: Fred Allen, Peter van Steeden, Neptune Fay, Gaffney Leotard, Sophie LaMoor, Sebastian Lapidus, Ray Smith, Andre Baruch
Listen for: The Town Hall News interviews with theatrical figures and Ray Smith's woodsman tall tales about trout and bears.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.