What happens
Lux Radio Theatre presents a dramatized version of The Jolson Story, the Columbia Pictures screenplay that won PhotoPlay magazine's Gold Medal Award, broadcast on February 16, 1948. Steve Martin, a vaudeville performer, takes a young singer named Asa Yoelson under his wing and renames him Al Jolson when the boy's voice changes. Their partnership moves from small stages to Broadway, where Jolson's need to perform becomes his defining drive. Al Jolson plays himself, with Evelyn Keys as Julie and William Demarest as Steve, and Ludwig Donath as Cantor Yoelson.
Early twentieth-century vaudeville and minstrel theaters, a synagogue, and Broadway in New York, with later scenes in Washington, D.C. and Louisville.
Characters: Al Jolson, Steve Martin, Asa Yoelson, Cantor Yoelson, Julie Benson, Tom Barron, Lou Dockstader, Flo Ziegfeld
Listen for: Jolson singing, first as a boy, then as he takes over a blackface number in Louisville and later in the Winter Garden, and Julie Benson's first-night nerves.
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.