Free Shakespeare On The Radio: Richard II
Richard II: Episode 1
With Broadway dark until at least 2021 due to the pandemic, New Yorkers are experiencing the first summer in almost 60 years without The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare In The Park. Luckily, what might seem like a stumbling block was transformed into a serialized radio play so euphonious, it’s hard to believe the actors did it all through Zoom. WNYC and The Public Theater have teamed up to take what was to be a live production and segment it into a thoughtful and accessible audio interpretation of Richard II. Each episode opens with actors, educators, and Shakespeare scholars discussing how the play connects to current events, how artists are reinterpreting this stalwart of the white canon with non-white actors, and tips on how to get the most out of your listening experience. This series begins with poor King Richard in a pickle: the Duke Of Gloucester has been murdered, and court members Bolingbroke and Mowbray need the king to referee their dispute over who’s responsible for Gloucester’s death. (It doesn’t go well.) Richard II is a stunning listen, and actor Miriam A. Hyman’s take on Bolingbroke’s famous opening speech is reason alone to tune in. [Morgan McNaught]
Speed Of Sound
How “Who The Let Dogs Out?” Conquered The World
This new music podcast forgoes discussion of songwriting and instrumentation to focus on what really determines the success of an immortal earworm: the marketing. Host Steve Greenberg drops an unbeatable debut because the story he tells is his own. He is the one person most responsible for unleashing “Who Let The Dogs Out?” onto an unsuspecting public in 2000. On the premiere of Speed Of Sound, he artfully treats every twist and turn as inspired shop talk, starting from the moment some white British guy walked into his office pushing his own cover of the song. Greenberg realized the song could sell if he changed the frantic Caribbean tempo to match “Whoomp! (There It Is),” and at one point he literally Asked Jeeves who let the dogs out. But the road to success is much bigger than one man: Greenberg’s tale about this divisive song involves everyone from Hanson to Lenny Kravitz to Sidney Poitier’s nephew. Though it never climbed higher than 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Who Let the Dogs Out” found an unlikely road map to world domination through sports and children’s entertainment. [Zach Brooke]
The Michelle Obama Podcast
President Barack Obama
For anyone who misses the presence of role models in the White House, The Michelle Obama Podcast is like a warm blanket. The former first lady describes her new audio offering as an exploration of “the relationships who make us who we are,” so it’s probably no surprise that her most public relationship partner is her first guest. Before introducing her husband, Michelle Obama teases that the inaugural episode will focus on “one of those relationships that can take some time to figure out,” but this is not a marriage podcast (though what makes a happy family—and how she dealt with hot flashes—will be discussed this season, as she welcomes other family and friends to the microphone). Instead, she and the former president discuss something far more on-brand for the couple: “our relationship to our communities and to our country.” There are no gimmicks or segments to the ensuing discussion, just a straightforward chat between a genial married couple about being raised to fight for the common good. “It is not enough that I succeeded on my own,” she says at one point. “I have to care about what happens to the kid in the desk next to me.” It’s nice to spend an hour living in a space that celebrates being and doing good. It’s almost hopeful. [Patrick Gomez]
Zack To The Future
Back To School
Saved By The Bell star and former teen heartthrob Mark-Paul Gosselaar has never seen an entire episode of the sitcom that made him a household name. Now, decades later, Gosselaar is revisiting the series with co-host Dashiell Driscoll to watch along for the first time. Driscoll, meanwhile, has seen every episode; he’s known for writing a Saved By The Bell spec script and the popular video series “Zack Morris Is Trash,” making him an ideal copilot for Gosselaar’s journey back to the ’90s. With a new reboot coming to NBC’s Peacock streaming platform (which Driscoll is writing on and Gosselaar is returning for), Zack To The Future is a timely companion series and a clever promotional tool. This is a national moment in which ’90s kids have plenty of time on their hands and are embracing the comforts of their own nostalgia, and listening to Gosselaar and Driscoll indulge that nostalgia is a pleasure. [Jose Nateras]
24 Comments
Would it be too much for her to ask her delightful, role-model, hubby Barack why he spent more effort making sure Bernie didn’t get the nomination that he did speaking out against Trump?
Why? Like why would she care? Obviously, the Obamas didn’t think Sanders was the best course for the country and asking for them to flagellate themselves for your benefit is selfish and stupid.
It was a rhetorical question.
oh yeah absolutely, it’s “selfish and stupid” to wonder why they chose to use their influence to push the pro-corporate credit card company guy who helped cause the student debt crisis and who’s wanted to cut social security and medicare his entire career over someone who’s spent his lifetime fighting for the poorest in our nation. really selfish to wonder why they’d do that.
And asking us to care about her low grade depression after their neoliberal policies led us to Donald Trump is beyond the pale.
Fuck the Obamas. They should be depressed. They explicitly bailed out Wall Street over Main Street, and we’re still feeling the affects.
“our relationship to our communities” I think the answer is somewhere in there
Maybe he doesn’t feel that way? I could see him being a bigger fan of other people than Biden or Bernie honestly, he seemed to just let the primaries play out uninterrupted though.
I’m still mad he and Schumer got played by McConnel and left a SCOTUS seat open for a year. Judges are everything. That was lazy and cowardly. If Obama had forced it, Garland would be on the Supreme Court, Kennedy might not have retired since the balance didn’t favour his decisions, and the unspeakable damage of a Trump Presidency might have been contained, ruining the country only for decades instead of generations. Biden is a placeholder even if he wins. I hope the next people coming up fully embrace expanding SCOTUS and court-packing.
I hope the next people coming up fully embrace expanding SCOTUS and court-packing. Even if he/she is a Republican?
Because the Obamas are the same brand of Centrist vultures cashing in on their brand as any other political dinosaurs celebrated blindly by neolibs and bootlickers with the same blind loyalty as MAGA chuds. Expecting their stans to find any flaw is like asking a dead civilian in the Middle East to be unbombed by an American racketeer/president aiding and abetting the war economy. They’re going to stay dead while that politician retains a loyal and ignorant following because “omg so wholesome/better than what we got now” rhetoric.The saddest part is that neu-AVclub’s new editor-in-chief Patrick Gomez is one of those stans with a capital S and it’s fucking embarrassing.
How much money do these people need? They’re fucking set. Just go off and hang out with your Billionaire friends Obama, we don’t need you anymore.
Amen.On that note, you know what I hate about the Obamas now pivoting to video and podcasteo? The fact that they wasted an opportunity to leverage their star power to make a Netflix series where Barack and Michelle meet cute after having been tossed into the ocean, their memories wiped clean by whatever, and then they’re abducted by the CIA and sent on a mission to steal all of Jimmy Carter’s peanuts, because Carter turns out to be raising money for a third presidential term using cheap Honduran labor to manufacture chunky peanut butter instead of the smooth peanut butter America desires by smuggling into Honduras an entire peanut butter factory hidden in the lumber for Carter’s humanitarian projects.
The twist is that that the Obamas were married before they forgot that they knew each other, providing some romantic tension. And maybe there can be a pun when Barack kills Jimmy Carter by throwing him into a vat of peanut butter, and Michelle quips, “Smooth move, ex-lax.”
Or maybe this…
https://www.theonion.com/barack-obama-storms-out-of-michelle-obama-podcast-inter-1844574468
What effort did Barack do to block Bernie? I missed that bit.Also, if there’s any answer to that question, I’d expect it’s “I entered the White House with the pretense of a reformer, but found that the DNC/RNC establishments have perfected whittling out any behaviour that toes the line, so post-presidency Barack thinks Sanders is either not representative of the centre-of-right Democratic Party, or that the DNC is too weak-willed to push a leader that offers massive reform. Status quo, baby!”
Here’s what we know. There was reports (unconfirmed, but pretty widespread) that Obama was telling Democratic higher ups that if it looked liked Bernie might win he would “step in.”Bernie is crushing Biden in the first three primaries. Now, let’s not even get into how the primaries are run (but i will say that the very first one was calculated by an app literally called “Shadow” that was from a company with many ties to the Buttigeg campaign, a campaign where the mayor of not even the biggest town in fucking Indiana was suddenly being taken seriously by the media as a PRESIDENTIAL candidate), but let’s say that after Biden wins ONE state after coming in 5th, 4th, and 2nd respectively, Obama makes phone calls to Buttigeg and Klobuchar. We don’t know exactly what is said in these phone calls, but both candidates drop out right before super Tuesday and endorse Biden. Warren stays in, for whatever reason, and gets a large infusion of mysterious and still unexplained super pac money to stay in. So I don’t have a memo signed by Obama that says “I fucked Bernie, YOLO”, but when you look at all the facts (and the leaked DNC emails from 2016 which VERY CLEARLY stated that they viewed Bernie Sanders as a threat) I don’t think it’s wild to say that Bernie was fucked. The democratic party saw a burgeoning youth movement and moved heaven and earth to stop it by nominating Joe Biden, a guy EVERYONE in the party agreed just was not up to the task of running a country. And maybe he’ll win the election this year. It certainly seems that way now, but he’s a HORRIBLE candidate and Trump has a base that’s not going anywhere so who the hell knows? But if he does win I would not put a lot of stock in anything actually getting better in the next four years, so god help us all when the GOP reveals whatever competent facist they put into office in 2024.
It’s definitely not surprising- the rumours of DNC doing just as much for the 2016 nomination and all that. There’s also the harrumphing establishment Democrats did with “The Squad”, or even Feinstein’s chastising of children over the Green New Deal activism (“I’ve been doing this for 30 years!”/ “You didn’t vote for me!”)- if you don’t kowtow to the party line, the party doesn’t work with you.
Obama threatened if Bernie was getting too much traction that he would intervene. And he did.
After Nevada (which Bernie won) all the other candidates dropped out, endorsing Biden on the way out. Almost instantaneously Clyburn made it clear that the black vote should go for Biden.
After that Bernie was toast.
So yeah, take it or leave it, that’s what happened. Bernie got screwed twice now by the Democratic party.
And the Democrats will get what they fucking deserve.
I watched Saved By The Bell as a kid bit I really really don’t gt 90s nostalgia. It was a shitty show I used to like. Kids like lots of dumb things. Why do we need to revisit them as adults? I feel the same way about the Full House reboot. Nostalgia is creepy. Either way, good for Mark Paul Goselaar that his career is going well enough that he feels comfortable doing this. It’s funny when child or teen stars have success as an adult, thy become so obsessed with being SERIOUS AND RESPECTABLE and they have no sense of humour about their pasts, until thy reach a certain level of success then it’s OK. Michelle Williams had to get a million Oscar nominations playing poor women who die tragically before she’d do a goofy comedy. And Drake used to get so prickly about Wheelchair Jimmy until he sold enough. So Mark Paul Goselaar is doing well. Good for him.
I hope Michelle Obama has Joe Biden (and/or Jill Biden, too) on her podcast close to the election (but not so close that mail-in ballots have already been sent.) He needs that suburban women vote!
Can people stop idolizing that war criminal and let him fade into obscurity with all the other ones?I’d say it’s time to move on but here we have Biden coming up, whose main campaign strategy is “Let’s go back to the status quo that brought us Trump and see if we can get an actually competent fascist next time around.”
It’s possible to not ignore somebody’s faults while simultaneously recognising their relative strengths compared to others. “They are all the same” is the reason we now have Trump.
Podcast adjacent. John Hodgman was making therounds a few weeks ago. He was plugging his animated series on FX Cake. There’s 5 episodes out and they are great.
Isn’t it a major breach of journalistic ethics to sleep with someone to get an interview, Michelle?
Oh, so sorry you millionaires get to live a life of celebrity and comfort…