Theater History and Mysteries

Send us Fan Mail Philippa Soo plays the role of Eliza in the Broadway mega-hit Hamilton .  And I gotta say, the more you read about Phillipa Soo the more that you like her.  She’s talented, she’s been in a bunch of stuff, she adopted a dog on her birthday, got to throw out a first pitch at Yankee stadium. All accounts, she’s a fierce performer on the stage and a compassionate human off of it.  One...

Send us Fan Mail Lin-Manuel Miranda was not the first person to pursue multi-racial casting to make a political point.  Heather S. Nathans of Tufts university shares the history: “On March 5, 1858, around the first anniversary of the Dred Scott decision and on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, African American abolitionist William Cooper Nell re-staged the massacre as a tableau vivant at Bos...

Send us Fan Mail Hamilton, the musical, is a show about the founders of the United States, who were mostly white men, and to a much lesser extent white women, and it is played by people who are definitely not matched to the race of the historical figures.  Like, that is the most conspicuous part of the show.  The one thing that you can’t miss about Hamilton is that the cast is predominantly are ac...

Send us Fan Mail This is a show about Hamilton the musical, and it’s about one of the main characters.  The point is to give some deep backstory to figure, and as I have promised, to never miss an opportunity to explore a crazy coincidence or good ghost story along they way. This is the 6th episode about Hamilton, and this is our ghost story.  Or rather, a monster story. There were plenty of crazy...

Send us Fan Mail I’ll get right to the point: Did Alexander Hamilton own slaves? There are those who definitely say yes.  There were those who definitely said no, although those voices are growing quieter.  Even Ron Chernow probably lands on the side of “probably.” But what are the facts?  What do we know for sure?  Does it all add up to an air tight case against him? But the even bigger question,...

Send us Fan Mail What’s the one thing you knew about Hamilton before the show?  One thing I remember from elementary school?  It’s the duel. Isn’t the duel a big deal in the life of Hamilton? Stop: What does the show have to say about the duel.  What’s the take home point?  What does it mean? Probably, you like Ham by the end, and it’s sad. Also probably mad at Burr for killing him. If you’re like...

Send us Fan Mail You have seen the musical and you know how the story ends: Aaron Burr shoots Alexander Hamilton.  This is the podcast where we ask big questions, so let’s ask the biggest of all: Why?  Why did these two guys do it?  There IS more to know about the whole event…why was dueling even a thing?  It was the 11th duel Hamilton had been involved with…was that a little or a lot?  But there’...

Send us Fan Mail What if history remembers you, but for the wrong thing?  Not like, for a bad thing, but you did a bunch of amazing things that are all forgotten, and one kinda stupid thing is all that people can remember about you? Here’s an example. Have you ever heard of Herbert Marx?  Nope, that’s not Karl’s brother.  (Herman and Edward are Karl’s brothers) This Marx created a company called M...

Send us Fan Mail Alexander Hamilton did some major things that still impact the world we live in today...but you might not really get what those are from watching the musical.  Today's episode is designed to review those things and figure out what the musical focuses on, what Hamilton really did, and why it might be even more impressive than you might think. My goal is to tell you something y...

Send us Fan Mail What’s the most awesome theater moment you’ve had?  Not, like, the biggest show you’ve been in, or the biggest audience you’ve played to, or the best tickets you ever had…those are important .  I want you to think about awesome …the time you were in times square on the way to a show, stopped to take a picture with Elmo, and got photo bombed by Patrick Stewart.  Or the time you wer...

Send us Fan Mail To really understand the smash musical Hadestown, you have to understand…mines.  Hear me out. Hadestown isn’t just a re-telling of the ancient Orpheus tale, as the name suggest it’s a story that focuses on a particular location…the underworld. And there is obviously a conscious choice to make the underworld much different than the Greeks imagined it, and much more like the company...

Send us Fan Mail Hadestown is a story about politics.  You’ve seen the show, so you know that it’s the ancient Greek story of Orpheus put in a fictional but modern setting – a “a post-apocalyptic  American Depression  era.”  It’s a world of environmental ravage and resource scarcity.  Hades himself is unambiguously an industrialist, a mine-owner, and a tyrant.  “It was hard times” is a line straig...

Send us Fan Mail Are there crazy connections in the world?  In 1984 I was a 4th-year college debater at Cal. State Fullerton with aspirations of finishing in the top 16 in the country when my partner quit.  In January I was paired up with a sophomore, and we needed an argument nobody else was talking about…right when a change of power in Egypt put Hosni Mubarak in the geopolitical spotlight.  We b...

Send us Fan Mail Hadestown Episode 5 script – Autism In my favorite episode of this show, I went to the Phantom of the Opera sites on Facebook and asked people what they thought about the show and why it worked for them.  The follow-up question was whether they would come on to the show and speak about their experiences.   Of the responses I got, a surprising number of folks identified that they w...

Send us Fan Mail Hadestown Episode 4 script – The song (Epic 3) What does it mean to be a tortured genius?   Does it mean getting your show to Broadway, and finding yourself unable to get out of bed one day, crushed by the weight of all the things that happen because of your work?   Maybe.  And that happened to Dale Wasserman, the author of the Man of La Mancha. Does it mean you wander around insi...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 light...

Send us Fan Mail 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,...

Send us Fan Mail 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. *               *                 *                *                  * Imagine a scared kid going to their first day of high school....

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 “borde...

Send us Fan Mail 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 p...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 i...