Benet from the Blue

The National Broadcasting Co. prides itself on never letting the Columbia Broadcasting System get ahead of it. In the opinion of many a serious student of U. S. drama, ahead is just where CBS got last April when its skilful experimental Workshop of the Air produced Poet Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City. It was the most competent U. S. verse play written for the radio and, setting aside the beauty of its speech and the power of its story, The Fall of the City, as produced by oldtime Radio Engineer Irving Reis, added some new dimensions to the technique of radio drama.

NBC countered with "streamline Shakespeare" by John Barrymore and his wife Elaine Barrie, and prepared to put one over on CBS with "original" radio plays by Maxwell Anderson and Stephen Vincent Benet. Playwright Anderson's The Feast of Ortolans, an historical drama about a party of 18th Century French intellectuals who haggle about the Revolution right up to the moment the Revolution walks in the door, is to be given next month. Last week Poet Benet's show, an operetta based on Washington Irving's A Legend of Sleepy Hollow, had its radio premiere over NBC's Blue Network. Consensus was that artistically, CBS still had the bulge.

Offered as an "outstanding educational program in the form of entertainment of great popular appeal," The Headless Horseman suffered even more from overbilling than it did from the thunderstorm which made its reception almost inaudible. It was written last winter for music students of the Bronxville, N. Y. High School to perform and when he wrote it the author of Pulitzer-Prizewinning John Brown's Body was obviously versifying in the lighter mood of his Ballads & Poems (1931). First of its jingling tunes is sung by a chorus of girls at a quilting bee, where Katrina van Tassel sorrowfully reveals that, although she loves Brom van Brunt, she must marry Ichabod Crane, because in the van Tassel family the eldest daughter must wed a schoolmaster or be carried off by a ghost.

Chorus: Alas, alas!

We've come to a pretty pass,

When the only choice that a maid can boast

Is Ichabod Crane or a family ghost!

How Brom frightens poor Ichabod with a pumpkin head and then reveals himself as a qualified pedagog (who is about to open his own school), is revealed as this radically modified classic concludes. Of more point in Bronxville, whose progressive educational system is famous, than on a national network is Brom's final song:

I'll never, never flog

An urchin for a blunder,

I'll reason with the little brat,

Exceeding calm and cool,

And, if he's good with ball and bat,

Why, he can say the earth is flat,

We're not responsible for that

In our progressive school!

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