radio theater
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Live from Liberty Hall, it's...
The Imagination Workshop would like to become the "Saturday Night Live" of radio. With its topical humor and fast-moving skits, the Workshop is one of the few satirical comedy shows on the air today -and public radio stations across the country are taking notice.
Margi Posen, Rick Tamblyn and Dave Greusel rehearse their character voices for the Imagination Workshop on the stage at Liberty Hall, 642 Massachusetts St. The Workshop's next performance is 8 p.m. Saturday at Liberty Hall.
Paul Kotr / KANSAN
By KC Trauer
Kansan staff writer
when the Coke came out through her nose, Jeanne Fisher knew she was on to something. Fisher, program director for West Virginia public radio, was listening to KANU's Imagination
Workshop at a National Public Radio convention last spring. It was the first time she heard
"I was drinking a Coke, and they played some of it," she said. "I laughed so hard Coke came out of my nose. And I thought, "This is great. We've got to have this."
Fisher is just one public radio program director discovering the Imagination Workshop, a live Lawrence radio comedy show gaining acclaim across the country.
Besides claiming a nationwide audience — 121 public radio stations air a taped version of the broadcast—the Workshop has attracted loyal followers in Lawrence who fill Liberty Hall for the live broadcasts or listen to it on KANU-FM 91.5, the public radio station of the University of Kansas.
It is capitalizing on a resurgence of radio as serious entertainment, a renaissance led by Garrison Keillor's variety show, "Prairie Home Companion," in the early 1980s. Keillor's show of down-home humor and eclectic music kicked open the door for other radio shows to reclaim radio's legacy as mainstream entertainment.
The Imagination Workshop, a satirical sketch comedy show, is succeeding by using "Golden Age" radio's appeal with a twisted '90s spin.
“It's such a wonderful medium, so much more than TV and film, I think,” says Darrell Brogden, the show's producer, director and principal writer.
"It utilizes the thing between your ears. I tell people the Imagination Workshop is right between your ears."
With a talented and experienced cast — mostly professional voice-over artists, radio personalities and theater veterans — the show a listener's imagination to unlikely places.
"If you wanted to put John Wayne, Winston Churchill and Eddie Murphy on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you could do it on this show," Brogdon says, "and it'd be easy, too."
The show hasn't done that yet, but on a recent broadcast it did put a surly Sinead O'Connor adrift with three yokels on a Nashville Network fishing show.
Roberta Solomon, playing Sinead the-Ripper, stepped up between Rick Tamblyn, David Greusel and Paul Friedman at the center stage microphone in Liberty Hall.
Scripts in hand, they all hovered around the肌, occasionally stopping back to turn the wheel.
Complete with defiant stance and Irish litch,
Solomon delivered a bull's sine Eye Sinead O'Connor who spotted a politically correct protest against catching bass.
At the end of the skit, Solomon stepped back from the microphone and splash ... with the help of a prerecorded sound effect, her character dove from the boat and swam to shore.
Armed with jabs at pop culture, politicians, commercials, medicare television and even its radio companions, Imagination Workshop's team has been able to come up with them and then quickly retreat for another mission.
It takes nakes aim at the holidays and provides a post-mortem for Campaign 92 at 8 p.m. Saturday.
However, because radio drama had withered as an art form in the late 1950s, the canon of radio plays was slim. Most of the Workshop's plays were original works Brogdon himself adapted from short stories or old radio plays.
The best thing that could be said about the quality of the early shows is that they .well
Paul Kotz / KANSAN
The Workshop did its share of "clunkers."
But the Workshop began nine years ago as a different kind of show, more serious than silly. Then, it consisted of 90 minutes of radio drama.
Roberta Solomon, a Kansas City radio newscaster, is in her second year with the Imagination Workshop, a comedy show featuring satirical skits and musical spoofs.
Brogdon says, and the inexperience of the original cast, none of whom remain, did not help.
"We were very bad for a few years as we learned how to do this," Brogdon said. "Most of the cast had never done radio before, so it was all new to them."
The fortunes of the show changed as Brogdon started tinkering with the format. In 1986, the troupe performed a few short comedy skits between the dramas. During the next few years, comedy dominated more and more of the show until the Workshop converted to 90 minutes of non-stop comedy in 1990 and eventually became today's hour version.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
It probably was no coincidence that the 200-seat Lawrence Arts Center started selling out — and kept selling out until the show moved to Liberty Hall in spring 1992.
The switch to comedy was a marketing decision above all else. Brogton wanted to take the show to a national market, and its former format was hard to sell.
"The show was difficult to describe in one sentence," he says. "We couldn't say we were a show that performed dramatic plays with some comedy or comedy with some drama. From a marketing standpoint, it was a lot better to just say we were a comedy."
NOVEMBER 24, 2019 KU Campus
Continued on Page 6.
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