TECUMSEH — Events and personalities from Tecumseh's past provide the material for the show at the Tecumseh Center for the Arts that will cap off the city's bicentennial weekend .
The "WTCA Radio Show — Celebrating 200 Years of Tecumseh" features several local performers staging an old-time radio show with comedy and music in a format inspired by "Philco Radio Time" with Bing Crosby and "A Prairie Home Companion" that aired for many years on public radio stations. Also performing will be the TCA Big Band and the Tecumseh Community Chorus. Showtimes are at 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday, July 21, at the Tecumseh Center for the Arts, 400 N. Maumee St. Tickets are free but need to be reserved in advance. Reserve tickets online at thetca.org , by calling 517-423-6617 or at the box office, which is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and one hour before the shows.
"The show is in Tecumseh, about Tecumseh and deals with Tecumseh history, but really, it's about people," Nichols said. "It's about the people of Tecumseh and not only the past but the present and the future as well, because we have a part where we're doing messages for the future. It's really about the people that make up the town."
As part of his research to write the show, Ben Nichols interviewed several people around town and recorded those interviews for the "Tecumseh Bicentennial Podcast" that he has started posting online . He did the podcast interviews at his office at Covenant Church in Tecumseh, where he is the worship arts director.
"We're touching on all the all the historical hot points: Tecumseh Products, of course, the celery farm, the Meyers OTW biplane , the Dynamic Kernels project ," Nichols said. "And they all have bits of varying sizes that are attached to them. Like the Meyers thing, I actually turned it into a little radio commercial. We did a lot of parody work, for instance, that one is 'The Way You Look Tonight,' but instead is 'The Way You Fly That Plane.' So I've had a lot of fun taking historical standards and rewriting them into things, like 'My Funny Valentine' is now 'My Verdant Celery.' So it should be it should be entertaining, if nothing else, and fairly historically accurate."
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Another bit is inspired by comedian Bob Newhart's one-sided phone conversations.
"The one I wrote is about the naming of Tecumseh and one of Musgrove Evans' friends, fictitious friend back in Pennsylvania, who calls him up to ask how things are going and gets him when he's in the midst of naming Tecumseh," Nichols said. "So it's a lot of silliness."
A couple of the musical pieces Nichols wrote for the show are "You're Gonna Want to Come See Tecumseh," which has become known as the "Tecumseh jingle" because it is like a radio jingle, and "200 Years," which is a larger piece.
"That will involve the whole choir, and Faith Rhodes will be featured as a soloist in that," he said. "That is, I think, quite lovely. It's one of those things where it started out just humming in my car and turned into something like, man, I really like this. This is good."
Nichols also works at the Tecumseh schools where he plays piano for choir director Simon Suboski, and he played the melody for "200 Years" for him.
"He said, 'It is catchy,' because he was singing it in school before I had words to it," Nichols said. "I'd be playing on the piano, and he would be humming the melody. He's like, 'Oh, it sticks.' I was like, alright, that's a good sign."
Suboski is one of the cast members along with Nona Bennett, Karen Miller, Derrell Kent, Xander Olney, Clayton Riptide, Amy Slupe, Molly Rice and Emily Nichols. Singers include Kimberly Stephens, Nate Smith, Suboski, Rhodes and Nichols.
The first table read of the script gave Nichols confidence that others will be entertained by what he'd written.
"Everything was untested, untried, just in my head and on paper, and then we went to the table read and had my actors read it, and we had a hard time getting through it, because they were laughing so hard," he said. "So that was a good sign."
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Nichols is also creating a digital program for the show, which will have links to information about the people and places and events mentioned in the show, such as the burial location of Gen. George Custer's horse, Don Juan, near the intersection of Russell Road and Occidental Highway.
Working on the show and podcasts has been a learning opportunity for Nichols. He is not originally from Tecumseh but he and his wife, Emily, have lived in the area for several years.
"That was what prompted the podcast was digging into exactly that, getting to know people who are either longtime residents, grew up here, have history or have family here, from generations past to people who just moved here last year," he said. "Business owners and private citizens and anybody — young people, old people. I have a high school student and the mayor of Tecumseh and everybody in between."
So far, Nichols has posted 16 of what will be about 30 episodes of the "Tecumseh Bicentennial Podcast." They can be found on his website, sdgcreative.net/podcast , YouTube and podcast services from Spotify, Apple and Amazon. They generally range in time from 15 to 30 minutes.
"It's been fantastic," he said. "I told my wife that just doing this podcast has been one of my favorite experiences here. Getting to know people and and kind of dig in past the 'Hey, how are you? Good. OK, bye,' and then to what really motivates you, what inspires you, what makes you excited to get up and do things?"
The episodes are not only the interviews. He works in some comedic bits, such as the character Preston Plotfodder, the worst private eye in the world. Plotfodder also makes an appearance in the "WTCA Radio Show."
This isn't the first show or podcast he's done — he did a show called "Not Really Radio" when things were opening up as the COVID-19 pandemic subsided and did short, fictitious podcast episodes to go with it — but he found this project to be fulfilling.
"I'm talking about and dealing with real things, real people," he said.
— Contact reporter David Panian at dpanian@lenconnect.com or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @lenaweepanian .
If you go
WHAT: "WTCA Radio Show — Celebrating 200 Years of Tecumseh"
WHEN: 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday, July 21
WHERE: Tecumseh Center for the Arts, 400 N. Maumee St.
TICKETS: Free, but must be reserved online at thetca.org , by calling 517-423-6617 or at the box office, which is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and one hour before the shows.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: 'WTCA Radio Show' to wrap up Tecumseh's bicentennial weekend with music, comedy
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