Frankenstein Audio Adaptation

With only four midnights to Halloween, it’s time to revisit Craig Wichman’s excellent audio adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, produced by the Quicksilver Radio Theater troupe.

Craig wrote, produced and also stars as The Monster, surrounded by a sterling cast and recording crew under the direction of Jay Stern. The play is available again for listening or downloading through the Radio Drama Revival site.

Treat yourself to this one, you’ll love every chill of it.

The Monster’s portrait, above, is by the great Kerry Gammill.

Listen to Frankenstein

The days of radio drama are long gone, but the art form survives through the efforts and considerable talent of people like actor/writer/producer Craig Wichman, founder of New York’s Quicksilver Radio Theater. Online streaming, podcasting and audio books are new avenues of creativity that this unique troupe of seasoned actors and technicians is actively exploring. Quicksilver has produced a wide variety of award-winning audio plays tackling everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes.

The script for Frankenstein: Modern Prometheus is an intelligent and very faithful 60-minute adaptation of what is, admittedly, a huge, sprawling book. Under the direction of Jay Stern, Joseph Franchini as Victor Frankenstein and Craig Wichman as The Monster headline a large cast whose fine work —complete with sound effects and an original score — makes Mary Shelley’s novel spring to robust life.

This Frankenstein has already earned deserved kudos from critic Leonard Maltin and Frankenstein expert Don Glut. Now it's your turn to experience it: Treat yourself to Quicksilver Radio Theater’s Frankenstein, streaming online this Thursday, October 11, at 1pm EST on Greater Portland Community Radio. Go to http://www.wmpg.org/ and click “Listen” on the menu at the top of the page. Part 2 will be streaming next week, on October 18.

The graphic illustrating this post is by yours truly. Thanks, Craig, for letting me cut loose!

The Cabinet of Dr. Frankenstein

Actor Conrad Veidt never essayed the part, but his likeness has been used to represent the Monster.

The first example is an audiobook adaptation from Oxford University Press, Bookworm Edition, 1998. It uses an image cropped from a vividly colored poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

 

The second piece features artwork recycling Veidt’s dramatic profile and clutching hands from the poster for Orlacs Hande (1924).

Autour de Frankenstein ("Around Frankenstein"), was published in 1994 in the Cahiers Forell collection of the Faculty of Letters and Languages of the University of Poitiers, in France. It is a compendium of scholarly articles in French and English with such titles as Innocence, Injustice and Incomprehension in Frankenstein; Frankenstein and the Excess of Signification: a Case of Unstable Balance; A Map of Russia and Understanding Frankenstein: (A Geo-angelological Folly in Seven Chapters), and Legends of the Animated Body: The Case of the Monster.