The finest radio drama of the 1930’s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them.
The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse. All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.
Mercury Theatre:
Dracula (July 11, 1938)
Treasure Island (July 18, 1938)
A Tale of Two Cities (July 25, 1938)
The 39 Steps (August 1, 1938)
Three Short Stories: I’m a Fool, The Open Window, and My Little Boy (August 8, 1938)
Abraham Lincoln (August 15, 1938)
The Affairs of Anatol (August 22, 1938)
The Count of Monte Cristo (August 29, 1938)
The Man Who Was Thursday (September 5, 1938)
The Immortal Sherlock Holmes (September 25, 1938)
Hell on Ice (October 9, 1938)
Seventeen (October 16, 1938)
Around the World in 80 Days (October 23, 1938)
The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938)
Heart of Darkness / Life with Father (November 6, 1938)
A Passenger to Bali (November 13, 1938)
The Pickwick Papers (November 20, 1938)
Campbell Playhouse:
Rebecca (December 9, 1938)
A Christmas Carol (December 23, 1938)
Counselor-at-Law (January 6, 1939)
Mutiny on the Bounty (January 13, 1939)
I Lost My Girlish Laughter (January 27, 1939)
Arrowsmith (February 3, 1939)
The Green Goddess (February 10, 1939)
The Glass Key (March 10, 1939)
Beau Geste (March 17, 1939)
Showboat (March 31, 1939)
The Patriot (April 14, 1939)
Private Lives (April 21, 1939)
Wickford Point (May 5, 1939)
Our Town (May 12, 1939)
The Bad Man (May 19, 1939)
Things We Have (May 26, 1939)
Victoria Regina (June 2, 1939)
Peter Ibbetson (September 10, 1939)
Ah, Wilderness (September 17, 1939)
What Every Woman Knows (September 24, 1939)
The Count of Monte Cristo (October 1, 1939)
Algiers (October 8, 1939)
Escape (October 15, 1939)
Liliom (October 22, 1939)
The Magnificent Ambersons (October 29, 1939)
The Hurricane (November 5, 1939)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (November 12, 1939)
The Garden of Allah (November 19, 1939)
Dodsworth (November 26, 1939)
Lost Horizon (December 3, 1939)
Venessa (December 10, 1939)
There’s Always a Woman (December 17, 1939)
A Christmas Carol (December 24, 1939)
Vanity Fair (January 7, 1940)
Theodora Goes Wild (January 14, 1940)
The Citadel (January 21, 1940)
It Happened One Night (January 28, 1940)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (February 11, 1940)
Dinner at Eight (February 18, 1940)
Only Angels Have Wings (February 25, 1940)
Rabble in Arms (March 3, 1940)
Craig’s Wife (March 10, 1940)
Huckleberry Finn (March 17, 1940)
June Moon (March 24, 1940)