Growing up in a large Catholic family, my siblings and I didn’t watch TV outside of the World Series and presidential debates. We did, however, have an enormous collection of old movies on VHS and a collection of cassette tapes almost as large, and every Sunday night on 88.5 we’d catch Ed Walker’s old-time radio show, “The Big Broadcast.” Every now and then too, spinning the radio dials, we’d catch a bit of Adventures in Odyssey, the long-running children’s series produced by Focus on the Family.

I associated the show, enjoyable as it had been, so strongly with Protestant radio that I was surprised to hear recently that Paul McCusker, who worked on Adventures in Odyssey over the past 30 years, had entered the Catholic Church. Not only that, but McCusker been producing Catholic radio drama for nearly three years at Denver’s Augustine Institute, an organization designed to train Catholics to participate in the New Evangelization.

I was able to preview McCusker’s latest work, an as-yet unaired drama titled Ode to St. Cecilia, and McCusker was kind enough to answer my questions by email.

After his reception into the Church ten years ago, McCusker began looking for a way to use his talent and experience in the Catholic world. Meeting Dr. Tim Gray, President of the Augustine Institute, produced the needed creative outlet. Gray was already interested in audio drama, and suggested starting with the story of St. Francis of Assisi. McCusker was initially reluctant.

“I’ve often felt like the saints’ stories are an easy default,” he said. “And, truthfully, it seems like the saints are thrown at us average Catholics like older siblings who seem to get everything right. But I said I’d take a look at Francis to see if there was a story worth dramatizing. I was surprised to find that there was a remarkably compelling story to be told. So we began with that one.”

Dramas on St. Patrick and St. Cecilia followed. In each case, through focus on the saints’ “vastly different” struggles, McCusker strives to render their stories “truthfully and unflinchingly. We had no intention of creating saccharine dramas. The essence of the saints’ lives are about their humanity and conflicts and decisions to say ‘yes’ to God. Those are the only stories I was interested in telling. These aren’t PR efforts for the Church or the Saints.”

The process for the three dramas so far has involved McCusker researching, writing, and directing all the episodes. (“A longer series might involve other writers and directors—but we haven’t produced one of those. Yet.”) The nature of audio productions, and the particular type of acting involved, means that they record in London, where “the actors … appreciate audio drama and how to act with their voices alone.”

“Audio is a highly-engaging and intimate medium,” says McCusker. “Sounds, voices and music nudge us to imagine what’s happening—to picture it in our minds as vividly as our imaginations allow. Stage and screen put the visuals directly in front of us, which can demand less of us. The only more intense medium [than radio] is a book.”

Despite the religious nature of the dramas, the majority of the actors are not Christian. In fact, McCusker says he doesn’t know “what most of them believe, though we talk about it from time to time in the context of our recording sessions.”

Most of the voices in Ode to St. Cecilia were unknown to me; but two had names familiar to my inner Shakespeare buff: Brian Blessed (Blackadder, Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing) and Derek Jacobi (who played both Richard II and Hamlet in the BBC television series). They’re joined by the actress Welsh actress Dame Siân Phillips. Prior to Ode, the three had last appeared together in the BBC series I, Claudius (1976). How does McCusker get this sort of talent on board? “Usually we create a wish-list for who we want to play a role and then contact the agent to see if the actor is interested, available and affordable.”

Although Ode to St. Cecilia is designed to appeal to adults as well as younger audiences, its early moments did bring back memories of Adventures in Odyssey, particularly in its employment of frame narrative. In Ode, the hapless music student Benjamin Fisk (played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes) is suffering from a serious case of imposter syndrome. Fisk, with his atonalism and his allergy medicine and an assignment to “write a piece about a dead woman I don’t even know,” finds himself sitting with sculptor Stefano Maderno (Christian Vit), poet and playwright John Dryden (Jacobi), and composer George Friedrich Handel (Blessed). Together, under the auspices of the authoritative and mysterious Mrs. Dilber (Phillips), they watch a play about St. Cecilia, from whose life each has sought inspiration.

It’s the sort of fantasy transformation that often falls flat on screen but operates more convincingly in the theater of the mind. In this case, it is effective largely because the Cecilia narrative feels more real and present than the frame. McCusker’s script and the actors’ performances weave together a story which is equal parts drama and feeling, supported by frequent touches of humor and an intelligent understanding of history. (John Dryden’s pronouncements, for example, are apropos.)

The drama also has refreshing moments of awareness designed to forestall listeners’ potential doubts about its seriousness: Fisk compares one villain to a cartoon character, only to be assured by Miss Dilber that such evil has always existed; Handel interrupts a particularly ghastly scene to ask how much more suffering they’ll have to watch (art, they are reminded, is oftentimes formed in the crucible of suffering).

Fortunately, given their key roles in the drama, the characters of Cecilia (Hayley Atwell) and Valerian (Gwilym Lee) particularly shine. Another bright spot is Cecilia’s brother-in-law Tiburtius (Harry Lloyd). The brief but nearly Shakespearean presence of a pagan gravedigger—whose offer to “recant” is rendered hilarious by his seemingly total misunderstanding of the term’s meaning—is priceless.

Ode to St. Cecilia will air on EWTN beginning Sunday, Nov. 26 (Thanksgiving weekend, and more importantly, the weekend after Cecilia’s Nov. 22 feast). Listeners who miss the broadcasts will be able to find recordings through Audible, Amazon, and Catholic bookstores. They can also check the website AIRTheatre.org for further details about this, past, and potentially future dramas—especially as McCusker admits to having “written scripts for various series that may be produced at some point. But it’s probably better not to say anything now.”