CRT star J.T. TURNER in A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Longtime CRT Player J.T. Turner (who played Scrooge in CRT's 2004 Radio Production) will be starring LIVE ON STAGE as Charles Dickens in this solo performance of A Christmas Carol. Dickens was well know for his public presentations of his famous Holiday work, and J.T. recreates the experience, portraying all the characters as he brings the work to life before your eyes.

Make this play part of your holiday tradition! Now in it's 13th year! Please support live theater!

A Christmas Carol, December 16-19 at 7:30pm, and December 20th at 2:30pm. Tickets $18 for adults, $15 for children 12 and under and seniors.Group discounts availabe for groups of 10 or more.

To Reserve Tickets, please call 508-942-9938

GLOUCESTER STAGE
267 EAST MAIN ST.
GLOUCESTER, MA, 01930

WHAT'S UP?

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. Just finished writing a script for an upcoming production, and now I am starting to write the script for Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. It's a very exciting project, and as a script writer, quite challenging; especially since we need to record it no later than February so we can get it into post production to meet the release deadline.

BUCK ALICE AND THE ACTOR ROBOT, our production with Walter Koenig, is going to be a blast. Jeff Gage has started the music score and we should see some scenes tracked by the end of the week. CHRIS SNYDER is back in full force at CRT, and he has joined MJ COGBURN with the editing of the production. We expect to have the production finished no later than February.

Have you checked our our newest release, HOODIE? It's a 10min short subject starring the kids who record with CRT. It's a lot of fun, and for a short time it's a free download over at our Lulu.Com store.

SETH ADAM SHER continues to work on TICONDEROGA, our epic 24 episode series set during the French and Indian War. He is on schedule and going great guns (no pun intended), and the project should wrap on time in early February. Episode 1 goes on the air Friday, Dec. 4th on Sirius/XM!

DIBBLE will be returning in an all new special, DIBBLE GOES TO FLORIDA! Not sure when it will be out, but we are hoping for late Spring. It has been recorded and awaits editing.

We had hoped to do a new Christmas Special for our Sirius/XM show this year, but we were very busy with other productions that were getting a little backed up. So, this year we will be repeating our 2008 CRT CHRISTMAS SPECIAL, with my guests J.T. Turner, Diane Capen, and the kids from JERRY AND THE PIRATES, Rob Cattell, Connor Doherty, and Ricky MacDonald. It's a fun 1 hour special, so hope you tune in! It will also be available on Lulu.Com I PROMISE next year we will have an all new special (In fact, I wrote it already! We really tried getting it done this year. See, in order to get it on the air in December and get the music done, we need to record in July!).

That's all for now! Time to get back to work.

IF YOU'RE IN FLORIDA ....

I spoke with William Luce tonight, and he told me that BURT REYNOLDS will be doing a staged reading of BARRYMORE in Florida the first week in December. Burt is one of the last true Hollywood icons. I hear the three day run has sold out, but there will be more shows in 2010. It's a great play, and I would LOVE to see Burt in it!! Wishing him all the best for a smash hit fundraiser!!

INTRODUCING OUR FIRST AUDIO BOOK

Colonial's new audio book division, Wyvern Audio, has just released its first
recording, David Michael Slater's THE BOOK OF NONSENSE.

It's on Lulu, and you can hear a preview.



The book is ancient, ravaged and full of utter nonsense. But the moment it
enters Daphna and Dexter's lives, bizarre things begin to happen. Why is their
father, who found the book, suddenly so distant? Is the old man who took it from
him some kind of hypnotist? Why is a giant, red-eyed boy menancing them? And
what does their thirteenth birthday have to do with all this? Daphna and Dexter
can't stand each other, but they'll have to work together to learn the truth
about the Book of Nonsense - before their lives come apart completely.

Review
WITH HIS FIRST FORAY into young-adult fiction, Beaverton middle-school teacher
David Michael Slater demonstrates genuine flair for the genre, and manages to
avoid enough familiar YA fantasy tropes in THE BOOK OF NONSENSE (CBAY
Publishing) to make it a respectable addition to any 12-year-old escapist s
library. Slater s story follows the exploits of twin siblings Dexter and Daphne,
who must decipher a thousand-year-old book of sorcery in order to save
themselves and apparently the rest of the world from malevolent forces. Original
touches lie not in Slater s plotline (heroes triumph, lessons are learned, and
everyone makes it home before suppertime), but in his flawed and realistic
protagonists: a pants-wetting, dyslexic boy and his shy, bookwormish
sister....If your kids have already ripped through the Harry Potter series, The
Golden Compass, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, then spending some time with the
reluctant adventurers in The Book of Nonsense is most definitely a good idea.
--Ben Hogan, Portland Monthly, September 2008

J.T. TURNER is the reader, and Chris Snyder did the editing. Running time is 4
hours.

COMING SOON FROM WYVERN AUDIO

ANGEL EYES - Read by Cynthia Pape
ONE-EYED JACK by Paula Miller - Read by Shana Dirik
LORENZO AND THE PIRATE - Read by Anastas Varinos
KICHI in JUNGLE JEOPARDY - Read by J.T. TURNER
MOUNTAIN SHERIFF by Earl Murray - Read by Sam Donato.
NOISES IN THE ATTIC by Miriam Hees. Read by Chris Snyder

THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES

I am VERY happy to be working once again with the great Ray Bradbury as we produce a dramatization of his iconic work, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES.

(From Wikipedia:) "The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists."

This is our fourth production with Mr. Bradbury, and the second in which he is allowing me to write the audio script (the first being THE HALLOWEEN TREE). He will be the script supervisor, so everything in there will be with his approval.

We are planning on recording in January and or February, and a Christmas 2010 release is planned.

More details on the production as we progress.

October continues

We had a great session the other day with our talented cast of youngsters whom we have named THE COLONIAL RADIO KIDS. The three scripts were written by 16 year old Anastas Varinos, who first appeared with us at the age of 13 in Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. We wanted very short comedies to use as fillers for our Sirius/XM show, and Anastas delivered. VERY funny stuff. You'll hear the first one soon.
Also in the cast were Rob Cattell, Connor Doherty, Sidney Fisher, Rebecca Stevens, Jack Libreco, and Matthew Scott Robertson. We'll be recording three more soon!

Next week is Halloween Week, and our Sirius/XM shows will be of the spooky variety Mon-Sat; so watch the schedule on the sites. I know they are running THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW, but I don't know when just yet. SLEEPY HOLLOW also plays on a few FM stations around the country as well, which is pretty cool.

Quick comments

This weekend we're recording the first three shorts starring THE COLONIAL RADIO KIDS! We have a number of kids who record with us, and there just are not enough roles for them. So, I thought it would be fun to do some short 8min comedies with an all kids cast! We're taping FREAKY FAIRY TALES this weekend.

TUESDAY we're taping the first few episodes of a new series called SOLUTIONS, INC., written by Mike Murphy. More on this later, as we will not be broadcasting them until next September.

Editing is going great on our productions of TICONDEROGA and Walter Koenig's BUCK ALICE AND THE ACTOR ROBOT. Both are due in early 2010, although TICONDEROGA begins a Sirius/XM run starting Dec. 4th.

The first week in November we wrap up our series JARREM LEE - GHOST HUNTER, which we started taping last April. The first 6 episodes begin airing next Friday, and the second set of 6 episodes will air right after the run of Ticonderoga, in the spring.

And also at the end of October, we will record our final two episodes in our FATHER BROWN MYSTERIES series, giving us a total of 16 episodes.

There are a few awesome things cooking here that I just can't spill the beans on - but they're REALLY cool and think our listeners are gonna like them.

Thats all for now ~cheers

PRODUCTION NOTES - HALLOWEEN

In 14 years we have produced about 20 programs that are perfect for the fall season - especially Halloween! Of that 20, some are episodes from a series (most notably Jarrem Lee, Dibble, and Jerry and the Pirates). And every October for the past 5 years we have been very lucky to see radio stations around the country broadcast our award winning production of Washington Irving's THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW - this year being no exception.

Our first "spooky" productions were in 1996 with our "Candlelight Tales" series (well, we only did four shows). The first was about a haunted light house in Boston Harbor (Minot's Light) and the second about the alleged ghost at Fort Warren (The Lady In Black). It's worthy to note that these two productions are the only two still in circulation that were recorded on 4 track tape! We went digital in 1997, and re-recorded all our previous titles - except for these two. It wasn't that they were not worthy, but the sales were not sterling and it would have taken too much time to re-record the extensive music scores they both had. Looking back on it - I wish I had re-made them.

THE STORM BREEDER came next, in 1997. Based on a New England legend, we recorded the show sometime in January or February as I recall. This was one of our first all-digital shows (the first being THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS). With a very odd running time of 40 minutes, it will air for the very first time on our Sirius?XM show this month (cut to 27 minutes, and better this way I might add)

Next came THE DEVIL'S BARGAIN, a tale that is very close to that of "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Not a bad one, but suffers from some hammy acting that in hindsight I should have recognized at the time and re-cast. Still, kids like it and it's a fun show.

This was the end of our CANDLELIGHT TALES series. I lost interest, and I don't enjoy writing ghost stories because I am just not good at it.

Mark (my business partner) and I had always loved Washington Irving's THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW, and had talked about doing it as a radio play as far back as our first production, BATTLE ROAD in 1995. Well, the book is not an easy one to adapt as a play (by that I mean, to stick right with the story with as much of the authors actual words, which is what CRT always tries to do). In 2003, I was getting antsy to do it, but the script still worried me.

I decided to take a stab at it to test the waters by working it into a Dibble Show. We were doing a 1 hour special, and I decided to have Dibble and the Gang do SLEEPY HOLLOW. This way, I could test out the script and the "visuals" to see if they would work, and they did! So, in October of 2004 I went to Tarrytown, NY (Sleepy Hollow) and did some research. The names and dates you hear the ghosts droning about in the opening are all actual names from the gravestones in the cemetery.

In Feb. of 2005 we recorded the show (in about 8 sessions), and it was released in October of 2005 with great results, and has remained a popular title ever since.

In 2006 we worked with the great Ray Bradbury on his DANDELION WINE, and when he heard the final result, he asked me if I would be interested in producing his SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES.

Would I!??

He sent me script and one month later, August of 2006, we were before the CRT mics recording his incredible story. We had so many boys audition for the two leads that I asked Ray what would the possibilities be of making a radio play from his book THE HALLOWEEN TREE. He gave me permission, I wrote the script (directly from his book - all the words in our show are Rays - including the lyrics to the songs) - and in December of 2006 we recorded the show.

Our publisher in their infinite wisdom did not release SWTWC until many months after it's completion, in November of 2007. Yes, that is a good time to release a Halloween show - the day after Halloween. Needless to say biz wasn't booming. However, it did well in 2008 and is doing well now for this Halloween as well.

THE HALLOWEEN TREE was released in October of 2008, and I think it's one of our very best. Chris Snyder outdid himself with this one.

In 2007 Gareth Tilley, a writer in England, asked if we would be interested in producing a series he had called JARREM LEE. Set in England, in 1900, it concerns a Sherlock Holmes type character who deals with the paranormal. I wasn't ready to do a series at that time, as family matters were dominating my life, however in 2008 we rolled on the show and have completed 12 episodes. They begin airing Oct. 23, and will be released as downloads once they air.

We did another Dibble episode (Dibbles Halloween, in 2005), and a Halloween episode in our series JERRY AND THE PIRATES (2008). So all in all, I think we covered the holiday! Will we do another? Most likely. Just need a good story and a good script.

Twitter

Thought I would give it a try. I am @JerryCRT if anyone is twitting around out there. I'm still not sure how it all works, or if anyone can see what I am twitting about, but I'm out there somewhere I hope.

MEET THE NEW CRT LOGO!

After a 15 year run, we are retiring our original logo of the old radio surrounded by our name. That design was by Marks dad, Herman Vanderberg and served us well for many years. For the next 15 years or so, we have had a new logo created by Roger Knox Design in Austin, Texas. Here it is!

New programs

I haven't really been neglecting my blog these last few weeks; but I haven't been feeling all that well, so the time spent on the computer has been for reviewing new scenes and sending out notes; some writing, and general back and forth biz emails.

We have just two more JARREM LEE's to record before finishing the series; those will be in early November. I'm trying to secure a recording date for three shorts we are producing, called FREAKY FAIRY TALES, and they are written by our own Anastas Varinos, who, at 16 years of age, pens a very funny script! All the actors will be played by the CRT Radio kids, so these should be a lot of fun. They will be used as fillers on our on-air radio show, and will also be available as downloads.

We will soon have some very exciting release information on our production of ZORRO AND THE PIRATE RAIDERS, which, up until now has only been available at our Lulu.Com store, but just wait!! We have some great PERRY MASON and ZORRO news coming very soon!

And it's October - my favorite month of the year. I think the story that best depicts the autumn season in New England is Washington Irving's THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW. More of a homage to the season than a horror tale, we produced the story in 2005, won the Gold Ogle Award for it, and happily is broadcast somewhere every Halloween season. This will be it's 5th Halloween, and will be aired on several stations, as well as Sirius/XM. I'll let you know the schedule here as soon as I know it myself.

We have a few other titles suited for the Halloween season, and maybe you'll check some of them out (And remember, many of our titles are in your local libraries as digital download books from your libraries website - check with your library!); also at this time of year, you may want to try two programs we did with the great Ray Bradbury - SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and THE HALLOWEEN TREE - both award winners, and SWTWC has a script written by Mr. B. himself!

JARREM LEE makes his bow in just a couple of weeks when the series premiers on Sirius/XM. We'll also be releasing episodes on Lulu once it airs.

That's all for now. More later I am sure. Hope you keep listening!
cheers