Sunday Night Playhouse - Casablanca (Lux Radio Theatre)

After a summer's rest, Vintage Classic Radio is back on the air.

Tonight on Sunday Night Playhouse — the hour-long Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Casablanca, broadcast 24 January 1944, a little over a year after the film's release. Hedy Lamarr stars as Ilsa Lund and Alan Ladd as Rick Blaine, with John Loder as Victor Laszlo.

Lux Radio Theatre was the most prestigious dramatic anthology on American radio — a full studio orchestra, a live audience, and a production budget that let the show stretch a film's story out to its natural hour-long shape rather than compressing it to thirty minutes. This version of Casablanca has more room to breathe than the shorter adaptations that followed it: more of Rick's café, more of the political tension in Vichy-controlled Morocco, more space for Lamarr and Ladd to build the weight of everything left unsaid between Rick and Ilsa before the story arrives at the airport.

Lamarr and Ladd were not the film's original stars, and that is precisely what makes this broadcast worth hearing on its own terms. It is not an echo of Bogart and Bergman — it is a different pair of actors finding their own way into the same story, at the height of their own careers, for an audience who mostly knew the tale already and wanted to hear it told again.

New broadcasts every week from Sunday Night Playhouse, Tuesday Night Detectives, Friday Night Noir, and Saturday Matinee. Thanks for your patience — we're glad to be back on the air.

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