Christmas outshines war, intrigue
Published 7:00 pm Wednesday, December 10, 2003
The Kraft Cheese Girls and Chiquita Banana join a cast of colorful World War II-vintage characters to bring island history to life this weekend.
A vintage radio show merges a Christmas theme with the impact of the war on Bainbridge in Ovation! Musical Theater’s “The Big Holiday Broadcast of 1943.”
“We wanted this musical play about a radio show to celebrate family, community and country,” said Ron Milton, Ovation musical director and author of the original script.
“We also wanted to highlight some important island history that’s as relevant today as it was in 1943.”
The show – the third performance by the musical group which started up last year – frames the Japanese removal from the West Coast through the lens of a fictional Bainbridge Island radio station that plays reluctant host to a USO Holiday Tour stranded here by a winter storm.
What Milton found compelling was the Bainbridge community’s response to the removal of islanders of Japanese descent – along with more than 100,000 others – to internment camps along the West Coast, a relocation ordered by the federal government after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Everyone looks at it from the perspective of the people that were pulled away, but there were 1,250 living on the island at that time,” Milton said. “What about the people who were left? What did they think?
“The 227 people taken away were really close friends and neighbors and associates of people on this island.”
“The Big Holiday Broadcast” opens as a tour bus for the USO Armed Forces breaks down on Bainbridge and the troupe takes over the local radio station.
As the USO crew rushes to send their Christmas Eve show over the airwaves, someone spots the troupe’s Filipino music director, Norma Swanson (played by Corinna Lapid-Munter).
Soon, an anonymous caller alerts military authorities stationed on the island about “a Japanese spy” at the radio station.
The fear of spies may have been heightened on Bainbridge, Milton says, by the presence of the world’s tallest antenna, built to intercept encrypted Japanese codes on the military base that is the present-day site of Battle Point Park.
“The commander of that (project) was Jerry Westheimer,” he said, “so I put him in the show. He comes over to arrest Corinna right in the middle of the broadcast.”
But Westheimer is stymied by the machinations of troupe member Sid Newhouse, played by Peter Denis.
Far from being a didactic history lesson, much of the show is crafted to entertain, with a dozen singing commercials and some 20 feature numbers.
Viewers, integrated into the play as the “radio show audience,” are also invited to join in sing-along carols.
All of the music is 1940s vintage or earlier, with the era’s commercials performed as originally written, from the Men of Texaco’s offer of “full service,” to the patriotic pudding mixed up by the Jell-O Voices of Liberty.
Milton listened to hundreds of hours of wartime correspondents’ reports to make certain that the components of the radio broadcast would be true to life.
His research convinced him that, although the war brought hardships, the experience united the country and galvanized many islanders to help their relocated neighbors.
“Through my research I discovered how together the country really was then,” he said. “I wanted to craft something that would be of the times.
“It became a real labor of love.”
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Ovation! Musical Theatre Bainbridge stages an original production, “The Big Holiday Broadcast of 1943,” written and directed by Ron Milton with musical direction by Corinna Lapid-Munter.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 11-13, and 2 p.m. Dec. 14 at St. Barnabas Parish Hall.
Tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $9 for children 12 and under, available at Vern’s Winslow Drug or by calling 842-0472.
For more information, visit www.ovationmtb.com or email info@ovationmtb.com.
