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This month we continue with Dash Cardigan by Thomas E. Fuller. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please let us know!
Tag: science fiction
30 Years of ARTC: Dragon Con 2005 part 2
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology! It’s not as detailed, but it really shows the growth of ARTC over the years. You can see all of the photos in their full size on our Flickr album!
Continuing our Dragon Con theme, we now present The Weapons Shop by A. E. van Vogt. This was a great year for ARTC as we got to perform alongside Battlestar Galactica star Richard Hatch and we also announced a new imprint that will hopefully see its first title released next year, The Sound of Liberty!
In 2005 ARTC created the Sound of Liberty project, a unique initiative to identify and adapt works of classic science fiction that put a focus on freedom and liberty. In the intervening time we’ve been busy finding suitable titles and negotiating with the authors. We hope to have the first title on this exciting new category for sale by next year, but the first title to be performed was The Weapons Shop by A. E. van Vogt.
We were pleased to have been granted the rights for this performance by his widow, Lydia van Vogt.
We’re really looking forward to diving into some of these amazing stories!
A great performance with a stellar cast! This one’s headed for ARTC Studio very soon!
We also got to honor one of our longtime writers, Gerald W. Page. You can hear his work in our catalog on The Assassins and The Happy Man! Thanks for all the great stories, Gerry!
Dash Cardigan part 1 of 4
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Welcome again to the podcast! This month we bring you…
Now…here’s where things are going to get confusing. Dash Cardigan was originally written as a 13-part serial. So why is this just part 1 of 4? Because what you’ll hear on the podcast is the hour-long version.
We get some of our best audiences at conventions. LibertyCon, Dragon Con, 221B Con, and a great many others have all welcomed us. A convention appearance, however, has to work within the convention’s schedule, and panels are almost always an hour long. So that’s how long our shows have evolved to be over time.
We’ll be breaking out of that a little as we continue our work in the studio (the full 13-part series of Dash Cardigan as well as Nairobi Jack Rackham: The Lost Gold of the Atlantimengani are both on the slate and we already have the 5-part The Dancer in the Dark), but you can always count on us having shorter versions of longer stories at conventions!
30 Years of ARTC – Solution Unsatisfactory, Dragon Con 2001
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology! It’s not as detailed, but it really shows the growth of ARTC over the years. You can see all of the photos in their full size on our Flickr album!
Last week we brought you the story of Guards! Guards! at Dragon Con 2001. But we’ve been doing two shows at that convention for several years now and the second part of that double bill in 2001 was Robert Heinlein’s Solution Unsatisfactory.
First, we got things started off with a bang by being introduced by the legendary Harlan Ellison. Mr. Ellison has performed with us in the past and we were honored to be graced with his presence once again, even though he did not act with us in this production.
Shortly afterwards we took a moment to present Henry Howard, owner and operator of Audio Craft Studio, with the ARTC Lifetime Achievement Award. Henry’s studio has served us well for years, and he was instrumental in our acquisition of ARTC Studio. He has also produced and edited a huge amount of our work and we make use of his expertise whenever possible.
And we led off the performance with Rory Rammer, Space Marshal! The name of the exact episode has been misplaced, so if you were there, let us know what we did at this show and we’ll edit this to reflect it. But no matter which episode it was, it was a rip-roaring good time!
See? A rip-roaring good time!
After the Rory Rammer episode, we got to the main event. In addition to all the other star power we commanded in 2001, we were also joined by Peter David!
One scene in Solution Unsatisfactory features the characters in a room filled with radioactivity. They were wearing full lead armor in the script. We simulated that with standard filtering face masks.
Be sure to check out the rest of the album for even more great pictures!
30 Years of ARTC – All Hallows’ Moon, Dragon Con 2000
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology! It’s not as detailed, but it really shows the growth of ARTC over the years. You can see all of the photos in their full size on our Flickr album!
Continuing our annual appearances at Dragon Con, and 2000 was a real doozy. First, it included one of Thomas E. Fuller’s best original pieces, All Hallows’ Moon. But we were also priveleged to perform an episode of Ron N. Butler’s Rory Rammer, Space Marshal series, The Queen of the Spaceways with Ted Raimi, Alexandra Tydings, and Claire Stansfield! All that plus Zap thy Neighbor by James P. Hogan, and you’ve got a stellar lineup!
ARTC doesn’t normally do costumes. It’s actually a long-running debate within the company – how to create visual appeal for a medium that doesn’t normally rely on visual appeal at all! But when you’re performing live, the audience expects to be able to see something and asking them to close their eyes can lead to inopportune snoring, so occasionally we give costumes a try.
Here’s another example of the costuming work for this piece. We have been very lucky to have a number of professional costumers work with ARTC in the past to help us on occasions such as this.
In 2000 we also debuted the ARTC Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in audio. Presented first to ARTC founder William L. Brown and informally known as the “Brownie”, the award was renamed as the Thomas E. Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.
We also had the great honor of performing with three of the stars of Xena, Warrior Princess that year. Ted Raimi hammed it up as Rory Rammer, turning in an uproarious performance…that also happened to be about half an hour longer than we’d scheduled it for! Claire Stansfield and Alexandra Tydings were also spectacular in the roles of Michiko Sakai and Aphrodite DeHavilland.
This performance is still recalled fondly by those members of ARTC who were lucky enough to be present.
We hope you’re enjoying this look back at ARTC! If so, let us know! And don’t forget that your support is extremely important. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Buy a CD or make a donation!
30 Years of ARTC – The Man Who Traveled in Elephants
This being our 30th anniversary, we thought we’d dip back into the past and recap some of our previous performances, triumphs and tragedies, in a series of posts. And don’t forget our Chronology! It’s not as detailed, but it really shows the growth of ARTC over the years.
In 1998, ARTC experienced an important moment in its history as we unveiled the first in our Dean’s List series of Robert A. Heinlein adaptations, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants. And, boy, did we go all out. You can see all of the below photos at full size in our Flickr gallery.
First, if you’ve read the story, you may notice that it’s not quite like anything else that Heinlein wrote for the most part. In fact, Bill Ritch and Brad Linaweaver, who were instrumental in helping us get the rights from Virginia Heinlein to do this adaptation, described it as “Bradburyesque,” referring to legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Wouldn’t it be fun, we imagined, if we could get Ray Bradbury to introduce us?
So that happened. You can even hear the recording of the introduction on our studio production of the script.* Then, how about a bunch of guest stars. Like maybe Anthony Daniels. Or even Harlan Ellison, a legendary writer in his own right!
So that happened, too. And then we’d cap the whole thing off by making it a tribute to the Dean of American Science Fiction himself.
The presence of scream queen Brinke Stevens in our opening piece, A Real Babe (by Brad Linaweaver, adapted for audio by William Alan Ritch) was just the icing on the cake.
It was a performance for the ages. It was something nobody on the stage will ever forget.
*The Man Who Traveled in Elephants is currently available for sale exclusively at our live performances. We are hopeful to bring it back to general release in the near future through all of our digital and mail order distributors.
The War of the Worlds: The Untold Story part 3 of 3
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And, at last, we reach the third and final installment of this retelling of the classic science fiction story that has inspired so many others throughout the ages. Except…
There’s one more chapter left to go. And that’s the one where we go into the studio and make this sound as good as we possibly can. ARTC’s Podcast is a fine example of our work – as one of the few audio drama companies that we know of to perform live, we take pride in this work and want it to have a life beyond the one or two performances we are normally allowed to give it. It’s also a great example of what we do for people who may not be familiar with us.
But it’s just a sample. In the studio we can get rid of feedback, get the exact right inflection, eliminate awkward pauses, make sure the effects are at the correct levels, and the music can really soar!
So if your only exposure to ARTC is our podcast, why not try out a studio production? You can get them here on this website or at Audible.com or Audiobooks.com. We thank you for listening, and we’ll be back next month with another example of the excitement of live audio theatre!
The War of the Worlds: The Untold Story part 2 of 3
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We ended up performing The War of the Worlds: The Untold Story twice in 2013. The debut performance was, of course, Dragon Con, which is where this podcast performance came from.
But the second time was at the Marcus Jewish Community Center, and it was a blast. We cooked up a bit of new Foley since we weren’t going to have to work around convention crowds, and the MJCC sports a top-notch theatre space. We hope to get back there again some time!
In this photo, you can see Foley mixer Larrie Fisher (left), and Foley artists Anthony Fuller, Beth Braunstein, and Jason Boldt (left to right), plus cast member Clair W. Kiernan (downstage). Society has somehow come to the conclusion that the actors are the ones in a performance to be celebrated, but the fact is that without Foley, audio drama isn’t quite as magical and we spend a ton of time developing ours to be as good as we possibly can.
The War of the Worlds: The Untold Story part 1 of 3
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This month we bring you The War of the Worlds: The Untold Story by Ron N. Butler, based on the original novel by H. G. Wells, performed live at Dragon Con, September 1, 2013.
Making the decision to commission Ron to write this adaptation wasn’t easy. We’d sworn for years that despite our many adaptations, including a bunch by H. G. Wells, that we would never do this one. It seemed too risky to try to follow in the footsteps of St. Orson Welles.
But in the end, the allure of commemorating the 75th anniversary of the most famous radio broadcast of all time proved too much for us, and so we went for it. We think the result was very much worth it. Be sure to let us know what YOU think!
Dr. Will Ward, Science Wizard: Sherlock Gnomes
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Performed live at 221B Con! Yet another installment in this ongoing serial. Like it? Want more? Let us know!