Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a classic episode of Beatles Blast and a new and very special episode of Curtain Call!  You can tune in at the website, or if you’re on a laptop or desktop, you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM Since we brought you an hour of awful covers of Beatles songs last week on Beatles Blast this week we decided to cleanse the pallette with a show that collects some particularly nifty covers of Beatles songs. In this mixtape show you’ll hear everyone from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band to Willie Nelson and all the musical styles between, all doing their versions of Beatle songs.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch presents an hour that lets you sample four brand-new examples of musical theatre.

Mel opens the show with music from Fantastically great Women Who Changed The World. Based on the picture book by British author Kate Pankhurst, and developed by Kenny Wax, the producer of SIX, this self-described “smash hit kickass-pirational pop musical” is currently touring Britain and is expected to run in London’s East End and possibly transfer to Broadway later.

With numbers by songwriter Miranda Cooper and Jennifer Decilveo, book by Chris Bush and lyrics by the three aforementioned creatives, the piece follows a young woman who leaves class to meet a variety of iconic women from history such as Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Emmeline Pankhurst to name just a few.

The Visitor is a stage musical with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey and a book by Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah, based on the 2007 film of the same name. It premiered at The Public Theater in October 2021. Negotiations are underway for a run on Broadway, Hopefully with its off-Broadway star, David Hyde Pierce, again in the lead role as Walter.

The film focuses on a lonely man in late middle age whose life changes when a chance encounter with an immigrant couple forces him to face issues relating to identity, immigration, and cross-cultural communication in post-9/11 New York City.

Next up is Emma Rice’s musical adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. This daring new take on the classic novel is currently running at The National Theater in London, and a transfer to Broadway is possible in 2023 or 24.

Finally, from Chicago, Mel has a small sampling of Ed Rutherford’s adaptaion of J.M. Barrie’s spooky stage play, Mary Rose.  Barrie, most famous for creating Peter Pan, tells the story of Mary Rose, a girl who vanishes twice.As a child, Mary Rose was taken by her father to a remote Scottish island. While she is briefly out of her father’s sight, Mary Rose vanishes. The entire island is searched exhaustively. Twenty-one days later, Mary Rose reappears as mysteriously as she disappeared…but she shows no effects of having been gone for three weeks, and she has no knowledge of any gap or missing time. Years later, as a young wife and mother, the adult Mary Rose persuades her husband to take her to the same island. Again she vanishes: this time for a period of decades. When she is found again, she is not a single day older and has no awareness of the passage of time In the interim, her son has grown to adulthood and is now physically older than his mother.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Also on The AIR, Wednesday at 11 PM, we revisit the premiere edition of The Comedy Vault from back in 2016, when the show presented a wide variety of comedic performers, all mashed into one funny hour. The Comedy Vault can be heard every Wednesday at 11 PM, with the new episodes replayed a couple of weeks later, Monday at 8 PM.