arts&life radio On The Radio PHOTO COURTESY OF DETROITROCKNROLLMAGAZINE.COM Metro Detroit fans of old-style radio plays launch their own show. TOP: A family gathers around the radio in the early 1930s, when the Charlie Chan radio plays were popular. MIDDLE: Sheldon Kay taping his Rock & Roll Lawyer Show. RIGHT: Rehearsing for The Inscrutable Dr. Pong, Crime Solver are (from left) Penelope Calcaterra, Steve Sussman, Rob Grodin and Ted Friedman. BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER F ans of old-style radio drama, take note: You can return to those thrilling days of yesteryear at 6 p.m. Friday, Jan. 12, when a new Detroit-produced radio play, The Inscrutable Dr. Pong, Crime Solver, will make its debut on WCXI-AM. The play, the culmination of almost two years of effort, was the brainchild of Farmington Hills attorney and amateur musician Sheldon Kay. Kay hosts an AM radio show, the Rock & Roll Lawyer Show, where he discusses legal issues and plays American roots music, especially “rockabilly” songs. He likes to feature local rock artists and groups on the show. Kay says he has enjoyed radio plays since he listened to them as a child late at night on WWJ. Over lunch at the Plaza Deli, where he eats every Saturday afternoon, Kay got to know a fellow diner, local songwriter and playwright Myron Stein of Southfield. Stein, 76, a semi-retired juve- nile court probation officer and art teacher, has long been active with the Village Players in Birmingham and frequently contributes to their annual “Shorts & Sweets” festival of one-act plays. A few years ago, Stein invited Kay to the festival, where he got the idea of producing a new radio play. Stein was on board immediately. In fact, he had written a one-act stage play, Pong, that he thought he could easily adapt for radio. He modeled both the stage play and radio play on the old Charlie Chan stories that first appeared as novels in the 1920s and were subsequently adapted for film, radio and television. Chan was loosely based on Honolulu detective Chang Apana. The character was con- ceived as an alternative to neg- ative Asian media stereotypes like the villainous Fu Manchu. For his cast, Stein enlisted some fellow Village Players members: Rob Grodin, 63, a retired nuclear medicine technician from Huntington Woods; Steve Sussman, 67, an architect from Birmingham; and Penelope Calcaterra, 61, a legal assistant from Waterford. Joining them is attorney Ted Friedman, 75, of Southfield, who participated in a read- ing of Stein’s one-act plays at Congregation Beth Shalom two years ago. Stein and Grodin are also Beth Shalom members. Stein says his original play, Pong, which was performed at the Village Players’ “Shorts & Sweets” festival five years ago, was only about 10 minutes long. He had to expand it quite a bit to create a 40-minute radio play. Once the script was written, the actors and Kay got together about once a month at Kay’s office to rehearse and discuss music and sound effects. The process took close to two years. The recording was done at the Trion music studio in West Bloomfield. The play is set in a kosher Chinese restaurant. Sussman is the narrator and plays a few other parts. Grodin is the inscrutable Dr. Pong. He says he prepared by watching old Charlie Chan films and con- sulting a theater professor to help him master the Chinese- American accent. The crew’s biggest challenge was syncing the sound effects with the spoken lines. • details The Inscrutable Dr. Pong will air in two parts, on Jan. 12 and Jan. 19 on the Rock & Roll Lawyer Show on WCXI-AM 1160. It will also be live-streamed at rockandrolllawyer.com. jn January 4 • 2018 27