Mercury Theatre On the Air s

?Private Lives ?

by NOEL COWARD

Produced and Scripted by Orson Welles

Starring Orson Welles

 The action concerns a divorced couple, Amanda and Elyot, both recently remarried, who accidentally book adjoining suites at the same hotel for their honeymoons. The play centres on the two leads and their agonising realisation that they still care for each other, and contains some of Coward's best dialogue.

Private Lives is a play written by Noel Coward in 1930. Coward, who also starred in the first production alongside Gertrude Lawrence and Laurence Olivier, wrote the play specifically with Lawrence in mind. The play was conceived on a trip around the world, and completed in only four days, while Coward was convalescing in the Peace Hotel (then known as the Cathay Hotel) in Shanghai after a bout of influenza. It was Coward's most enduringly successful work and is generally regarded as the high point of his career both commercially and artistically.

He had always declared that no leading lady would ever play the role of Amanda as well as Gertrude Lawrence did. But on the last evening he would ever spend in London, a friend urged him to see the new production with Maggie Smith in the part. Tired and ill, he reluctantly forced himself to go along to the Queens Theatre for the show. But at the end, he admitted that Maggie Smith's performance was the best he'd ever seen.

From Wikipedia

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.

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.

Approximate play time of 1 hour.

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How to Calculate Shipping Discount:

Always start with the noted highest price S&H (CD) set (eg:$6.50), then take a dollar off of additional CD SET s normal S&H price (eg: 2nd  Audio CD s Shipping is $5.00 - $1.00= $4.00) and add those together; in this example the total S&H is $10.50

Another example: If you bought 4 sets of AudioBooks

SHIPPING

W/DISCOUNT

Winning CD Bids

SET 1

$6.50

$6.50

4.99

SET 2

$5.00

$4.00

1.99

SET 3

$5.00

$4.00

1.99

SET 4

$4.00

$3.00

1.99

TOTAL S&H

$17.50

$10.96

The total cost of 4 sets would be $17.50 for shipping PLUS the COST of the Audio CDs themselves $10.96 which would equal: $28.46

If you have any questions please feel free to email me, thank you!

On Aug-04-07 at 16:12:46 PDT