More On: broadway
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Broadway has temporarily gone dark, but the pod-way is up and running: A full-scale musical podcast debuted this week. “Little Did I Know,” based on a novel by Broadway producer Mitchell Maxwell, features 22 original songs over the course of its nine episodes. Set in 1976, it follows a young director named Samuel August (played …
Broadway has temporarily gone dark, but the pod-way is up and running: A full-scale musical podcast debuted this week. “Little Did I Know,” based on a novel by Broadway producer Mitchell Maxwell, features 22 original songs over the course of its nine episodes.
Set in 1976, it follows a young director named Samuel August (played by YouTube star Kurt Hugo Schneider) and his scrappy quest, with college friends, to revamp a run-down summer theater with a season of new productions.
“Little Did I Know” also stars Patrick Page (“Hadestown”), Lesli Margherita (“Matilda”), Disney star Laura Marano and veteran actor Richard Kind, and features music by Tony winner Doug Besterman (“The Producers”).
Director Marlo Hunter, who’s also working on a “Saved By the Bell” off-Broadway musical, says crafting a musical in podcast format is “very new. What’s important is we’re not just taking a musical and chopping it up into nine episodes. The form and rhythm are entirely different.” Live musical audiences, she says, “have been really schooled in when to expect a song” — i.e., every few minutes — whereas podcast listeners are more attuned to straight narration. Each 23-minute episode threads the needle between the storytelling structures, and features on average only a couple of songs each.
Hunter, laying low like the rest of the world, says it couldn’t be a better time to be unveiling a unique creation people can experience from home. “It’s really nice to be able to bring this to people — to tell a new story in the middle of all of this,” she says. “We do this because we love it, and it’s part of our souls.”
The first three episodes of “Little Did I Know” were released Tuesday from the Audio Drama Initiative, with subsequent episodes to follow each Tuesday.
“The Dating Game Killer,” from Wondery, is a new true-crime hit, telling in six parts the story of Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who was a mesmerizing contestant on the titular game show in 1978 — a year when he was murdering people.
Everyone’s rewatching their favorite shows right now, including “Scrubs” co-stars Zach Braff and Donald Faison. They’ll revisit each episode of their nine-season hospital sitcom on “Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald” from iHeart Media, starting with the pilot. The first episode debuted March 31.
Actress Tessa Thompson (“Thor: Ragnarok”) is the latest star to jump into the podcast-fiction universe with “The Left Right Game” from QCode Media, which previously produced “Blackout” with Rami Malek and “Carrier” with Cynthia Erivo. Thompson stars as fledgling journalist Alice Sharman, whose nose for a story leads her into supernatural peril.
