The internet may have killed print. But it has not killed radio. Quite the contrary. And podcasts are booming.
There is something about the format of a recorded conversation that allows a level of sustained focus hard to match in written or read text. Especially when driving. Plus, when it’s theatre people doing the talking, you know there’s going to be high drama.
Ken Davenport, keeper of the always interesting blog The Producer’s Perspective and producer of, among other shows, SOMEWHERE IN TIME, which debuted at PCS in June 2013 (he was the guy with the hair walking around in a suit), has started up a podcast. And the remit is to deliver a steady stream of Broadway heavies giving a behind the music lowdown on how it all works.
So far, the conversation is simply unmissable.
So unless you’re one of the five people on earth who could resist any of the following nuggets below – stop reading this NOW and start listening to the podcast.
How about these dangled in front of your eyes…
* NY Post gossip columnist and polymath Michael Riedel dishes on Frank Rich at a pace faster than a speeding Brooklyn cab: “I’ve been on the enemy list for 25 years!”
* Todd Haimes tells the long, extraordinary, and impossibly drama strewn story of Roundabout Theatre and a little show called CABARET: “The board thought I was crazy.”
* Terrence McNally recounts what he had to do to get a ticket to MY FAIR LADY his very first night in New York City as a 17 year old newly arrived Columbia student in 1956: “They said, ‘It’s totally sold out for the next six months. 18 standing room tickets go on sale at 10 AM each morning. If you want one of them, you better be in line by midnight.’ Well, I slept my way through my first day of freshman week at Columbia the next day, but I did see MY FAIR LADY my second night in New York. And I saw it 11 more times. I guess I was stage struck.”)
And that’s just three of the current seven episodes in the case. There is incredible, irresistible gold in them thar tapes.
Clearly, Davenport is just getting started here. And he’s asking for requests. So send in who you want to hear from next.
You could miss this series. You could do that. But then we’d have to shoot you. Because this is America, and that’s what we do when there are problems.
And then Davenport would probably have to blog about it: “Podcast popularity leading to deaths” etc.
So don’t make us go there.
When it’s so much easier to go here.
