Theater History and Mysteries

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The ancient poet Virgil died of a fever with his master work still unfinished…and it was left to his executors to finish the work.  The book was the Aeneid, and it would be, in its time, the definitive work on the founding myths and stories of the Roman state.  This would cement his role as the greatest poet of his day, and it is a legacy that has never died.  Virgil is still read today.  

But the stories he told were ...

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The Romans stand at a key moment in human civilization.  Starting with roots in Greece, they are looking back at the Trojan war, they are thinking about their gods.  They have founded the first university in the western tradition.  And they are modifying and inheriting a series of explanations for the world.

Where does the wind come from?  What controls the oceans, or causes lightning, or earthquakes?  Why do the seaso...

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In ancient Rome, there is a poet.  What we now call western civilization is just beginning to find its first roots take hold … there’s an academy, and Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle are writing books that will be read for centuries.  In fact, books that we still read and talk and think about today.  And in this line, just around the time of Jesus, is our poet.

His star is rising, then crossed.  The Encyclopedia Brittan...

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Normally we release every other Tuesday, but this is our first special episode that uses the more traditional podcasting interview format.  This off-week episode comes just in-between Jesus Christ Superstar and Hadestown, which will start next week.

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Imagine a scared kid going to their first day of high school.  Maybe they’re new at the school and do...

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It is the 4th century AD…Jesus has been dead for at least 300 years but the stories and ideas about him have not.  After having been persecuted for decades, and fed to lions in the Coliseum, the Christians are now becoming the dominant religion under the new emperor Constantine.  But they aren’t the only Christians, and they aren’t the only ones with ideas about who Jesus was, and who Judas was.  They are becoming the...

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There is a new musical about to open, and boldly it declares that it will re-tell the story of the crucifixion, and do so from the perspective of…Judas.  The advanced publicity is massive – as will become a hallmark of the coming age of megamusicals – and the theme of the show has not escaped notice.  No less an evangelical figure than Billy Graham himself said the show was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege.”

His c...

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There is a new show out there, and this one is, boldly enough, a re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Judas.  That, by itself, is likely to be controversial.  And to take on this sacred topic the cast prepares itself by…covering the body of performer playing Christ and having the castmates lick it off of him, to get “closer to Jesus.”

The stage crew is pulling together the props and set piece...

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It is 1432 and the small, medieval French village is abuzz.  There’s a travelling theater troupe and they’re going to perform what is, far and away, the most exciting show the town will ever see.  It happens every year, but only once a year, and everyone – from the smallest child to the oldest farmer – is going to see it.  It’s like a modern musical; you’ve seen it before, but the performance itself is so spectacular ...

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The year is 1525 and William Tyndale is doing what nobody has done before…he has translated the Bible from Latin to English.  This as not well received; the church condemned the book, and one Bishop Tunstall bought all available copies and publicly burned them.  Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic.  The English government had sent agents out for his arrest.

That did not end matters for Tyndale.  He roamed th...

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I have promised that this podcast will explore the lessons that different shows have for theater and for life, and to explore the unexpected and unlikely connections the bring cross human lives on the plane of theater.  To help me better understand all that, I reached out to the internet to ask, anyone who was willing, to share with me what made their favorite show work.  That’s it – not anything deep or all that phil...

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I am writing this on Father’s Day, 2025, and to mark this occasion I will share my greatest parenting victory.  Last spring, during Taylor Swift’s eras Tour my daughter did all the things one does to try to get a ticket.  Tried the presale, pre-registered, looked at the fan resale sites, looked at the predatory reseller sites, put alerts on all her accounts.  But, no dice.  The only tickets that were available were we...

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An already famous poet is working, for the first time, on something light and fun.  It’s a children’s book of poems about Cats.  All his previous work has basically been about the anxious terror in the modern world, but he is going to do something delightful, for a change.  His Dad likes cats, he likes cats, his friends have kids who like cats.   The book is about cats.

He’s a handful of lines in when he stops himself ...

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You’ve heard this one before.  Maybe it’s a beautiful Siren, singing a gorgeous song only to lure unsuspecting sailors on to the rocks and eventually their death.  Or a snake, promising you a delicious apple, only to curse all of humanity with the knowledge of good and evil.  Or a wolf, disguising itself as an old woman, to trick an innocent child into letting it into their house, only to have the beast devour the you...

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A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging.  You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed.  But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those?  Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods,...

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Episode #4

The year is 1982.  The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay.  But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world.  If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piec...

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Cats, 3rd episode

A show is about to open in two days.  It features a power-packed pair of producers who would re-write Broadway history with two of the biggest musicals of all time, POA and Les Mis.  The female lead is in one of the final rehearsals, and it will be her place in history to sing into the world a song so powerful, so vital, so memorable, that it will immediately become a top-10 hit, get re-recorded more ...

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TS Eliot is the author of Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats.  That’s a book of poems that will get transformed into one of the greatest broadway musicals of all time.  In fact, it might be the Broadway musical – it so shaped what a Broadway musical is that it’s changed the way the world thinks about musicals at all.

But that wasn’t the poetry that put TS Eliot on the map.  In fact, TS Eliot himself would have smash ...

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TS Eliot had demons.  He wrote about his demons.  He said that writing poems were like demons escaping from his body, and that when he finished writing them he would experience a “moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

He wrote a poem that would become the archetypical anthem of a newly-emerging modernist movement in literature – ...

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 A young music producer has just seen a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar and was hit by his muse … he wandered the streets of Manhattan, unable to sleep.  A native of France, Alain Boublil felt he had to keep walking until he found a theme that could match the power and emotional intensity of what he’d just seen, and something uniquely French.  He came to the defining national moment…the French Revolution.  That ...