BEHIND THE BADGE - THE NEXT CASE - THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS - EPISODES - THE EVIDENCE

Dying is easy, comedy is hard...BOILED! 

THE WYNOT RADIO THEATRE SHOW is a spoof of the golden age of radio – a time when men were men, dames had moxy, and the sound of adventure filled the air waves.

The Colorado Springs Gazette calls it a ‘hilarious send-up of old-time radio detective shows’, complete with twistedly nostalgic commercials, hysterical ‘off-air’ actor interaction and occasional audience participation; your Grandpa's Old Time Radio Show this ain't! It's a full evening of adventure, suspense, suspenders, more suspense, and shiny silver undershorts! We mix nostalgia with in-your-face comedy to create a funny, fast paced, and down right ridiculous evening of theatre. The WYNOT RADIO THEATRE SHOW brings the RICK LUGER: PRIVATE DICK series onstage in all its old-time-radio glory!

Each "episode" includes official sponsors (fake products that parody the commercial sponsors of the classic radio broadcasts), an on-going short serial show (THE ADVENTURES OF THE LAST BUCKAROO, CAPTAIN COMET IN THE 33RD DIMENSION, or THE GRIMM SPECTRE depending on which performance you catch) as well as a game show segment, audience participation, applause signs, and more characters (80+) and props (150+) than you can shake a mic at.

The WYNOT RADIO THEATRE SHOW is an evening of side splitting "radio" theatre you can't miss!

   By CORY MOOSMAN, creator of THE WYNOT RADIO THEATER SHOW


    I was eleven years old when I first discovered radio drama. My family had just moved to Colorado, and I didn't have any friends. So to pass the time, I would go to the local library and check out cassette tapes of those great old radio detective serials. Shows like The Shadow, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Broadway is my Beat. Most kids would have joined a summer sports league or something, but I was a nerd and a loner, and preferred to stay in my room playing Nintendo (the old 8-bit system, mind you), and listen to comedy tapes and these new found radio shows. 

    I got addicted right away. I would listen late at night with my headphones on, long after I was supposed to be asleep. The storylines were paper-thin and the acting was cheesy as hell, but man, they were exciting! Stories of gun toting private eyes chasing down bad guys, dodging bullets, getting the girl. I felt like I was a part of something other kids weren’t even aware of. If only they new what they were missing! 

    Add to that a good solid dose of Robin Williams, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Steve Martin (through their comedy albums), and the foundation for a very sick mind was laid.

    Jump forwardn the spring of 2000. I was living in a small apartment with one of my friends, doing theatre at night and working a day job I absolutely hated. The job lent itself to a lot of “down time” - by down time I mean time when I was supposed to be doing something that I was hired to do, but time which I would actually do something else - write. This is where I really started working on Rick Luger; this crappy job. It helped stave off the boredom, and from a distance, made me look like a good employee.
    
    "That Moosman, he's always working so hard!"

    During one particularly mind-numbing shift I started working on a detective story spoof. That night I showed it to my roommate, Dan. 

    “It’s pretty funny, but you’re not very good with prose. Why don’t you try writing it like a play" 

    Now that was a good idea. Thanks, Dan.

    At that point I had already written two full length plays of very questionable merit, so why not try something else? I wasn’t any good at prose (as Dan pointed out), but I did enjoy writing funny dialogue. But the more I thought about it, the less confident I felt about taking a short and incomplete story about a dimwitted PI named Rick Luger and turning it into a stage play. For one thing, the landscape of the story was too big. All the great radio shows took you all over the place, from distressed damsels in their Manhattan high-rises to the scummy underworld of various low-life suspects and informants. They could do that, it was radio after all-everyone saw things with thier ears; But how do you do that on stage, where people are actually WATCHING? 

    Then I started thinking about those old cassette tapes, and suddenly it made perfect sense. I could write a “live” radio play which would use some of the great conventions of the classic radio shows – live sound effects, actors at mics with scripts, the “studio” audience feel. But it would be tongue-in-cheek, a parody with lots of bad jokes...lot and LOTS of bad jokes. And I could use every cliché’ in the book. 

    It took more than six years, hundreds of rewrites, many performances, two failed recording sessions, and a lot of fixing to finally get the first episode, DEATH WORE ELEVATOR SHOES, exactly where I wanted it. Originally the cast was huge: fourteen people in that first production. But time (and money) have thinned the ranks a bit. There are still as many characters, more now than originally written, but they’re all performed by four of us. 

    And it's a hell of a lot more fun to watch that way. 

    I'm also happy to say it doesn't take six years to write the episodes any more.

    As I've gotten older I’ve added dime store novels to my cassette tape collection (now happily residing in the digital age), and I’ve taken the liberty of purloining some of the best plot devices from some of the greatest PI stories ever written. Therefore, I must acknowledge Mr. Luger’s literary heritage; without Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, Rick’s continuing saga of crime, mayhem, dames, and kitchen utensils wouldn’t exist. Rick is tailor made in their image. 
  
    Well, sort of. 

    And the show keeps growing. What started out as a spoof of the detective shows has grown into a spoof of Old Time Radio in general. And we've only just begun....