It was a very focused week on nation’s theatre podcasts: Most centered around one topic or individual and mined them for all their insights and implications. (If we seem to be missing a few podcasts we highlighted in last week’s Top of the Pods, not to worry—not all of them update weekly. We’ll be back in another week with a new list of whoever’s added new episodes to the mix.)
Off and On
On this episode of Bernardo Cubria’s engaging, conversational interview podcast, actor Armando Riesco—star of Quiara Alegria Hudes’s “Eliot trilogy,” including the Pulitzer-winning Water by the Spoonful––stops by to talk about the pros and cons of having kids, why “not giving a fuck” can be dangerous and how being diagnosed with dermatomyositis taught him to care again.
Born Ready
This week the boys in the Bay invite another erudite Robert into their locker room to talk shop: Last week it was Rob Avila, this week it’s Theatre Bay Area program manager Robert Sokol, the man who spearheads the TBA Awards. Those SF-specific honors are explained in full, but the conversation also runs to the relative worth of awards in general. We also learn on this episode that regular hosts Rob Ready and Ray Hobbs have no idea who TBA presenter Betty Buckley is (they’re too young to remember Eight Is Enough, obviously).
Theatre Geeks This week, the community-theatre podcast out of Indiana talks about theatre promotion: getting listings online, posting signage, narrowcasting vs. broadcasting, the mystery of QR codes and composing great eblast subject lines.
OffScript This week, American Theatre‘s own podcast features a chat about the Steppenwolf leadership succession, a debate about the Debate Society’s new show, and an in-depth interview with Contemporary American Theatre Festival’s James McNeel.
Maxamoo This New York City-based podcast makes the most of a strong theme: gender (dis)parity in the theatre. After a frank talk with the founders of The Interval, a website devoted to female voices in the theatre, hosts Lindsay Barenz and Nicole Serratore join Liz Richards in discussing upcoming plays by “lady playwrights” (an “intentionally offensive” moniker, as Barenz admits) they’re looking forward to in NY, including Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy, Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, Katori Hall’s Our Lady of Kibeho and Teatr Warszawa’s 4:48 Psychosis (which prompts this memorable quip from Nicole: “Sarah Kane is the Sylvia Plath of the theatre”).
