Episode 255: Sweeney Todd’s Barbary Falls in a Trap

Sweeney Todd String of Pearls Audio DramaThis week we are thrilled to be featuring work by Grammy-nominated dramaturge Yuri Rasovsky, whose 2012 production The Mark of Zorro is up for Best Spoken Word Album of the Year. We hear a teaser from that new work available either through Blackstone Audiobooks or on Audible.

Also in this edition is Captain Radio, with a taste of Lifehouse Productions’ Count of Monte Christo.

And then week 4, the bloody culmination of Yuri’s 2007 production, Sweeney Todd and the String of PearlsSweeney Todd and the String of Pearls. Week 4 runs a starving pie shoppe baker, a curious kid and the gallant Martin Gestry into diabolical confrontation – and conclusion. The sensation of 19th century London has returned in plays, film, and now, audio drama, in this masterful rendering by radio great Yuri Rasovsky.

Yuri proves that audio drama offers storytelling tools unavailable in any other medium, mixing in grisly violence, unsettling performances, and sonic interludes.

With permission from the producer, here is Blackstone Audio‘s release of . If you like what you hear, find almost 2 dozen other titles by Yuri also available through Blackstone.

Part 4 of 4

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Radio Drama Revival – Episode 255

Episode 243: Everyone (Including Us) Digs Bill Evans

Bill Evans in German Jazz Workshop
Photo of Bill Evans at a German Jazz Workshop by Heinrich Klaff

Music sometimes takes a backseat to sound effects and dialogue in radio plays, but not in this lush play called Everybody Digs Bill Evans (the radio drama, not to be confused with the famous jazz album of the same title).

This 40-minute play, by Toronto-based playwright Bill Ballantyne, follows an imagined early career of Bill Evans when he was still a jazz unknown. The play pits his unique approach to impressionistic jazz against the expectations and commercial ambitions of music producers at the time. With some really delicious music in between!

First up, Captain Radio‘s review of a sound portrait by Mike Manafette, surveying the history of immigrants passing by Ellis Island.

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Radio Drama Revival – Episode 243

Episode 233 – Back From #CVG2011 with Stories To Tell and a Trip to 1918

1918 radio dramaToday we stagger back from a GREAT trip out west to Minneapolis, Minnesota for the CONvergence science fiction and fantasy convention (known to you Twitterers as #cvg2011).

We received the 2010 Silver Mark Time for FinalRune‘s production The Cleansed: Episode Zero and celebrated with other winners, including Jonathan Mitchell (who created the spectacular Moon Graffiti), Matthew and Monique Boudreau and Samantha Mason of 1918, Domien and Eline of The Witch Hunter Chronicles, Cayenne Chris Conroy of TEKDIFF, and Jack Ward of Electric Vicuna/The Sonic Society rounding out this year’s winners, plus Brian Price, Jerry Stearns and Kris Markman of Great Northern Audio Theater, Jeff Adams of Icebox Radio Theater, and Scott Hickey of The Grist Mill.  That’s a lot of sonic energy!

We talk to these folks, recap the experience at CONvergence, and go on to play 1918 Season One in its entirety. And did I mention Captain Radio‘s great review of the Hazardous Players’ production Knighttime? Stay tuned…

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Radio Drama Revival – Episode 233

Captain Radio Reviews: The Cosmic Express

Captain Radio Audio Reviews

Graphic - FunGraphix.com | Theme music - Shane Lamb

Title: The Cosmic Express
Producer: Joseph C. McGuire
Production Company: Radio Theater Project
Type: Drama
Genre: Sci-Fi, Speculative
Length: 16 minutes
Rating: AD-G*
Availability: Free to Listen – Radio Theater Project

Greetings, Audionauts – Captain Radio here, brought to you by RØDE Microphones, with a review of The Cosmic Express from Joseph C. McGuire and Radio Theater Project.

Be ever so careful what you wish for!

[SOUND BYTE]

In the far future, when, for most, work is more past-time than drudge, Eric Stokes-Harding (voice by Carl Waluconis) relieves his techno-lifestyle boredom by authoring adventure stories in former exotic Earth locales now erased by urbanization. He does so the hard way, speaking to an antiquated, voice-activated typewriter-replicant. Though less inclined to stray from her own modern voicewriter, Nadia (voiced by Laura Hale) shares her husband’s wistful longing to interact with more natural apparata:

[SOUND BYTE]

Their commiserating heightens until they genuinely long to abandon their sterile modernity for somewhere far more primal and sensually extreme – somewhere, perhaps, like …:

[SOUND BYTE]Original 1930 Illustration from Amazing Stories, "The Cosmic Express"
Providentially, an experimental new long-distance travel mode exists, The Cosmic Express, a means so quaint and so familiar to a modern listener that perhaps it was restored from off a dusty shelf in an old 23rd century relic shoppe. 

Or perhaps the reverse: Three-and-a-half decades after sci-fi author Jack Williamson penned this short story, perhaps a Los Angeles beat cop, and a wannabee Hollywood screenwriter, named Roddenberry conceived something akin to the Cosmic Express as he prepared to make a little television history.

Regardless, the Stokes-Hardings eventually bribe Cosmic Express operator Charlie (voiced by Matt Clausen) with a metal flask of rare, very aged ambrosia. Faster than you can say, “Beam us up, Scotty”, the pair finds themselves stalking the showery alluvial jungles of Venus. All too soon, though, unexpected reverse nostalgia sets in just as neighbors come to call:

[SOUND BYTE]

It helps the couple’s cause little, meanwhile, that Charlie has met his liquor-holding Waterloo in the rare, very aged ambrosia.

The Cosmic Express is the first episode in producer Joseph C. McGuire’s public radio series project, Future Past, which debuts in September, 2011. Produced at Skagit Valley College radio station, KSVR, Future Past will dramatize stories written during the pre-World War II Golden Age of Science Fiction.

While this premier effort might seem, and sound, unpretentious compared to current flashier independent audio production benchmarks, it does authentically recall the audio austerity broadcast during the prime years of network AM radio drama.

Listen to Joseph C. McGuire’s Cosmic Express at the Captain Radio Audio Drama Showcase, or hear it and other Radio Theater Project productions at Radio-Stories.Blogspot.Com.

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Until next time, Audionauts, this is Captain Radio™, signing off!

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Captain Radio™ Reviews Joseph C. McGuire’s Cosmic Express from Radio Theater Project

 

* Rating based on the Audio Drama Directory Ratings System.

 

 

Episode 228 – Firesign Theatre Goes Mad, While We Wait for the Electrician

Firesign Theatre Audio ComedyAudio comedy was never quite the same thanks to the antics of The Firesign Theatre, the legendary multi-trackin’, sound embellishing, sterephonic surrealistic psychedelic merry band of Phil Austin, Peter Bergmen, David Ossman and Philip Proctor.

While best known for their studio albums (such as Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him, which we hear today), the troupe had hundreds of hours of live radio experience, and had a particularly special era of a program called “Dear Friends.”

A new boxed set (which we wrote about back in February) contains ALL of this material – a whopping 80+ hours – along with beautiful art and hilarious anecdotes. Listen to the show for samples, or check out the DUKE OF MADNESS MOTORS boxed set and buy it today!

Treasures, and a huge thank to Phil Proctor for giving us license to broadcast this terrific stuff. We also take time to shout out for the National Audio Theatre Festivals, who are preparing for their annual pilgrimage to West Plains Missouri later this month.

Also, Captain Radio is here to cover Headhunters, one of the latest titles from the L Ron Hubbard Tales from the Golden Age collection.

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Radio Drama Revival – Episode 228

Captain Radio Reviews: The Swamp

Captain Radio Audio Reviews

Graphic - FunGraphix.com | Theme music - Shane Lamb

Title: The Swamp
Producer: Tanja Milojevic and LightningBolt Theater of the Mind
Type: Drama
Genre: Horror Mystery

Rating: AD-PG*
Availability: Free – LightningBolt Theater of the Mind

 

Greetings, Audionauts – Captain Radio here with a review of Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp from LightningBolt Theater of the Mind.

Lightningbolt Theater of the Mind LogoIf you ever experienced ghastly fear trying to escape a nightmare presence but unable to awaken, then you know Rachel’s terror.

[SOUND BYTE]

This hungry, menacing demon dream swamp metaphorically overflows into her conscious existence. First, Rachel (voiced by Milojevic) abruptly loses her best friend, Alice (voiced by Amanda Fur) when their college expels Alice for surreptitiously cheating off Rachel’s exam. Then, after Rachel pleads vainly with her mother (voiced by Deborah Adams) to forego a simple driving errand in an icy blizzard, Rachel receives the worst of all calls:

[SOUND BYTE]

Finally, adding to Rachel’s growing horror, the relentless swamp dream demon returns, this time with unholy help as Rachel’s mother, apparently casting blame for the accident, joins him in terrorizing her.

[SOUND BYTE]

The only seeming positive in Rachel’s waking life is the sudden appearance of dark, handsome, and very mysterious fellow student, Blake, who quickly, and quite literally, entrances her:

[SOUND BYTE]

Eventually, we gain the eerie sense of having missed a key scene along the way. By the time both we, and Rachel, learn what’s missing, it’s hideously late in the game … maybe too late.

Milojevic’s unhurried but increasingly suspenseful pace of revelation here renders The Swamp’s sudden finale all the more shocking, while the denouement “chaser” is served up suitably well chilled.

Milojevic emigrated with her family from Serbia to America at age 6. Since 2008, by day, she pursues an undergraduate degree in English Writing with a minor in Communications from Boston’s Simmons College. After-hours, she pursues her calling as an independent audio drama producer at which she steadily has improved.

For example, The Swamp, actually enlarged and scripted from a high school English Lit writing exercise, comes smartly decorated with background and bridging music so discriminately selected that I wished to hear the scoring again apart from the play.

Appearing instinctively to leverage her visual-impairment, Milojevic also aptly employs her keenly attuned hearing to evoke college environs and voices as binaural backdrop to her drama. You’ll need headphones or good stereo speaker separation to catch this particular nuance, but listen closely to this clip from The Swamp in which a professor’s voice seems at first to wander about randomly until we realize that he’s passing out student exam sheets:

[SOUND BYTE]

Having already completed over ten independent audio productions, Milojevic has also begun to create Spirit Blade Underground Alliance series episodes of Out of the Night in collaboration with Spirit Blade producer, Paeter Frandsen.

Ms. Milojevic, who aspires to graduate work at UMass and, thereafter, to teach Braille, seems also to be well underway with a moonlight career as a talented independent audio producer and voice actor.

Hear Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp on the Audio Drama Showcase at CaptainRadio.com, and listen to all her productions at LightningBoltTheaterOfTheMind.Mypodcast.com.

 

Until next time, Audionauts, this is Captain Radio™, signing off!

 

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Captain Radio Reviews Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp from Lightningbolt Theater of the Mind

 

* Rating based on the Audio Drama Directory Ratings System.