STONINGTON – Live, from where lobsters still rule the Earth, an experiment in old-time radio with a contemporary twist took over the airwaves Saturday night, as the Stonington Opera House hosted its second annual tribute to the radio variety shows of the 1930s and ’40s.

Maine Line Radio Live! From the Stonington Opera House, broadcast on a local radio station, both spoofed and honored the classic format, presenting what might best be described as a Down East cousin of Garrison Keillor’s well-known “The Prairie Home Companion.”

“The wonderful thing about a show like this is you can have everything from the ridiculous to the sublime,” Denise Lanctot, New York-based writer and director of the original show, said. “It’s just a fun form of entertainment – no one person or thing dominates.”

The heart of Maine Line Radio was an old-fashioned noir detective serial, featuring the adventures of the Lobster Police. Modern audiences still love spoofs of classic formats like the detective show that rely on actors’ voices and in-studio sound effects to bring the story to life, said Lanctot.

“They get to use their imagination in a way that TV doesn’t permit,” she said.

The tale of murder and infidelity in Stonington featured local actors Valerie Eaton and Andy Lyons, as well as a corps of New York theater veterans who summer on Deer Isle, including: Jane Ives, Alan Nebelthau and Opera House co-artisitc director Judith Jerome. Portland-based performer Mike Dank provided live sound effects.

Nebelthau is appropriately crusty as the show’s Scottish star – that famous shame-us, the Down East detective from away, Moose MacKay – while Ives saved the day as smart-mouthed waitress Edna Peabody. But Eaton is particularly memorable as the perpetually undulating femme fatale Bobby-Jo Hicks.

Delivering with a straight face such lines as, “If you think I’m going to cut a v-notch in your tail and throw you back in the sea, you’ve got another thing coming,” the cast brought the studio audience to tears.

Swift transitions between diverse theatrical and musical acts kept the two-hour show stimulating.

The Bob Haskell Big Band provided a taste of the Golden Age of radio with renditions of jazz standards “Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “Lulu’s Back in Town.”

Eaton, a trained soprano, sang several selections that harkened all the way back to the Opera House’s birth nearly a century ago – most impressively, a performance of the famous “Habanera” aria from Bizet’s Carmen.

And Frank Gotwals, dubbed “The Singing Lobsterman,” offered a folksy ballad to life on the Atlantic and a song mourning the perils of home improvement.

Local folk brought dry Maine humor to the show in a series of interviews conducted by Intrepid Girl Reporter, Cookie Baxter (Ives), introducing such notables as Norma Tewksbury, whose father once owned the opera house, Selectman Evelyn Duncan and animal control officer Charlie Berhalter. The show was broadcast live Saturday evening on WERU, the Orland-based community radio station, while a packed house in Stonington provided the laugh track.

“The most important thing is the audience – the listeners at home take their cues from you,” Lanctot said, asking her audience for “rude, raucous applause,” before the show went on the air.

“If you’re not laughing, they’re not laughing. If you’re not applauding, they’re falling asleep,” she said.

Lanctot needn’t have worried – the second annual Maine Line Radio Live! From the Stonington Opera House assured that the annual event will be a community favorite for years to come.