Behind the Scenes: Taking The Road to Morocco Again!

How do you bring Hope and Crosby back to the airwaves? The Mutual Audio Network goes behind the scenes of its hour-long recreation of the classic Lux Radio Theatre production of The Road to Morocco.

How do you get back on The Road to Morocco more than eighty years later?
Very carefully — and with a cast that's willing to have an enormous amount of fun along the way!
One of the biggest productions of the 17th season of Sonic Summerstock Playhouse was our recreation of the classic Lux Radio Theatre presentation of The Road to Morocco, bringing the wonderful light comedy of the Hope and Crosby partnership back to the audio stage for a new generation of listeners.
And recreating an hour-long classic radio comedy takes a little more than handing everyone a microphone and an old script.
The process began with script development, taking the original radio presentation and preparing it for a modern audio cast while preserving the timing, rhythm and wonderfully silly interplay that made the Hope and Crosby partnership work. The goal wasn't to imitate every inflection of the original performers, but to rediscover the fun of the material and let a new cast play with it.
Then there was the music.

Music was an essential part of classic radio variety and comedy, so finding and developing appropriate accompaniment became another important piece of rebuilding the show. The songs weren't simply extras to be discarded on the way to the dialogue. They were part of the experience, and we wanted our recreation to feel like a complete radio production rather than an edited-down version of one.
At the centre of it all were John Bell and Jack Ward, taking on the Hope and Crosby roles, with Patte Rosebank joining them in the principal cast.
Around them, Mel Rose, Larry Groebe and Pete Lutz became something of a miniature repertory company, with supporting performers jumping from character to character and sometimes taking on a surprising variety of roles over the course of the production.
That became part of the fun.

Recorded together over Zoom, the sessions had plenty of laughter between takes as the cast played off one another, experimented with performances and discovered just how well the comedy could still work when performers were allowed to bounce the lines back and forth.
That's one of the pleasures of recreating classic radio for Sonic Summerstock. These aren't museum pieces. Put the scripts back into the hands of actors, add voices, music and sound, and suddenly they become performances again.

The result is nearly an hour of Hope-and-Crosby-style comedy that hasn't been performed quite this way since the original Lux Radio Theatre broadcast.
For the cast, it was an opportunity to spend an evening playing radio.
For listeners, it's another chance to take The Road to Morocco.
And really, who could ask for a better summer trip?