528: The Radio Drama Episode
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2014
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our most ambitious live show ever! We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House—nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical, into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others.
- Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)
- Act One: Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a piece of reporting we broadcast in 2012, into a 14-minute Broadway mini-musical, created by people who normally work on Broadway. (18 minutes)
- Act Two: Comedian Mike Birbiglia, his wife, and his cat take a trip together and meet some parasitic zombie mice. (10 minutes)
- Act Three: Joshuah Bearman tells a story that’s a sequel to his memorable episode about his mother and half-brother David. It’s done onstage as a play that’s structured like a radio documentary, with Josh Hamilton playing Joshuah, and James Ransone playing his brother. (17 minutes)
- Act Four: Comedian Sasheer Zamata stages a radio play, complete with sound effects and comedians Nicole Byer, Chris Gethard, and Frank Garcia Hejl. It’s a true story about a recent bus accident. (9 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:28.0 | Hi, everybody. I'm speaking to you today from the stage of an opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. |
| 0:35.7 | Awarding to listeners that there is mild cursing throughout this hour and on the podcast. |
| 0:39.1 | We're not going to beep that. |
| 0:40.7 | And I'm here on an opera house stage with a story that is so small. |
| 0:43.8 | It almost feels wrong to tell it in a room this grand. |
| 0:48.8 | It's actually about a real opera singer, not a super famous opera singer or anything like that. |
| 0:54.0 | Karen Guilfrey makes about half of her living singing. |
| 0:56.0 | The other half she makes recording audiobooks. |
| 0:59.0 | And about a year ago she was staying at a hotel. |
| 1:02.0 | And she had a deadline on this children's book that she was supposed to be recording, |
| 1:05.0 | and the hotel room was kind of noisy. |
| 1:07.0 | She was seeing a lot of noise from the street. |
| 1:09.0 | And so she looked around for a quiet place and she went into the closet, put pillows all around to deaden the sound, sat on the floor |
| 1:16.6 | with microphone. And then the cord of the microphone went under the door of the closet out to her |
| 1:23.2 | laptop because her laptop had a fan that made noise. And so she closes the door, so it's pitch |
| 1:28.7 | dark, except for the light from her iPad, which had the text of the book that she was supposed |
| 1:33.2 | to read. And she began. The exciting exploits of an effervescent elf, written by Tricia Sugarek |
... |
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