ECC to present old-time radio Friday

Elgin Community College will step into the past Friday night with an old-time radio show featuring actors, actresses and sound effects.

"Evening Primrose" starts at 7:30 p.m. in Room 144 of the Advanced Technology Center on the main campus, 1700 Spartan Drive. Admission to the 30-minute performance is free and open to the public.

Denny Farrell of St. Charles, an ECC instructor and syndicated radio host, is organizing the program.

"It's like stepping into a time tunnel, when radio was really radio," he said. "It's time people go back and refresh their memory to see what it was like and how fun it can be when you use your imagination."

Farrell has been teaching a course on commercial voice-overs for several years and decided recently to add radio performance to the class work. Tonight's show has six characters acting out the story of a man who is locked inside a department store after-hours along with several other people - "and they can't get out."

"The actors have to create the mood, the ambiance," Farrell said. "They do different voices and that's the fun part about it."

The cast consists of a "wide range" of community members interested in radio, he said, from police officers to a music professor.

Farrell, a Big Band Hall of Fame inductee and host of the Original Big Band Showcase, said he intends to record the performance for possible use by Elgin High School and on his Web site, dennyfarrell.com.

For more information, call ECC at (847) 697-1000.