Welcome to the WRVO Playhouse

Welcome to the home of the best of old and new radio drama!  The WRVO Playhouse is heard every night of the week. The Playhouse airs on WRVO Monday through Friday from 9pm to Midnight and Saturday and Sunday from 8pm to 12 Midnight. For more information about The WRVO Playhouse, select from the following options: Playhouse Information Schedule, bios, and library info Playhouse Audio On-Demand Podcasts, Links, and feeds

WRVO Playhouse Hosts
Here's your hosts... Mark Lavonier (Weekday host) and John Krauss (Weekend Host):   Find out more about Mark and John and the rest of the WRVO staff by clicking here.

The WRVO Playhouse “Ellen Robinson Memorial Library”

Decades ago, the WRVO Playhouse began broadcasting old time radio with about twenty reel to reel tapes. Programs like the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and The Shadow. Now the collection has sprawled to nearly 5,000 reels and well over 13,000 broadcasts. In 1970, old time radio collectors were just beginning to network, and Ellen Robinson was one of those enthusiasts who joined several clubs that circulated classic radio shows on reel to reel. At that time, she offered to send the tapes to WRVO to make copies (provided we sent them back), and our collection grew. By the time her collection was donated in the later 1990’s, we held and were broadcasting around 7,500 programs that we had acquired by working in tandem with the Sounds of Yesterday and California’s old time radio institution SPERDVAC. This bolstering of our audio archive reached an unprecedented level when Ted Nettleton, friend of WRVO donated his collection of over 1,000 tapes – everything from comedy and mystery classics to operas and old movie sound tracks (and we mean the entire track). Within these two collections are thousands of well known programs and hundreds of what are now considered to be old time radio rarities, like broadcasts of Kate Smith, RCA’s “Magic Key”, and even half of a detective show unearthed for the first time in 50 years, “The Affairs of Peter Salem”. In 2008, Ron Zolweg generously donated another 900 tapes that have helped to fill in blanks on series already in our library, and give us a choice in quality of show. The surprisingly impressive quality of all three collections is the comprehensive and meticulous cataloging the trio performed, which in turn has inspired us to present the programs they’ve carefully collected in the most accurate way possible. In that effort, we’ve received assistance and further donations from friends of the Playhouse like Ed Clute and Art Pierce, who have passed on wisdom and shows that one couldn’t find elsewhere. The collection has been named in memory of Ellen Robinson, as her early lending and subsequent donation has helped make the WRVO Playhouse what it is today – Central and Northern New York’s bastion for classic radio from its golden age.

Playhouse Schedule

The WRVO Playhouse Schedule - Yesteryears To download and view WRVO's Playhouse schedule, you must have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.  Please follow this link to get the latest version. **You must have the latest version of Acrobat Reader (a free program) to view the schedule** December January February   Reminder: Subscribe to the monthly Playhouse e-newsletter to be notified when a new monthly schedule becomes available.

L.A. Theaterworks
WRVO welcomes L.A. Theater works to our regular schedule in the WRVO Playhouse. Discover radio drama that is contemporary, edgy, and significant. Look through the WRVO Playhouse schedule to see what play is coming up this week. L.A. Theater works regularly air on WRVO Monday at 10pm. Refer to the WRVO Playhouse Schedule for more information or visit their website.