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We apologize for the lateness of the podcast this month. Dragon Con ate our brain.
Well, this is it. The final chapter in this 5-part saga of The Passion of Frankenstein. It’s been quite a summer with an unprecedented three performances of this gothic masterpiece.
The Dragon Con stage.
We hope you’ve enjoyed getting to hear this piece from the different casts. We looked for some of the older performances, but they appear to have been misplaced. If we find them, maybe we’ll run them later.
“No, please! No more Frankenstein!”
In the previous installments of this piece, the music was done by Brad Weage. In this final installment we were pleased to have live music from The Ghosts Project.
Davis Petterson, Gabriel Monticello, and Paul Mercer
We also presented the Thomas E. Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award to William Alan Ritch and David Benedict!
William Alan Ritch accepts the Thomas E. Fuller Lifetime Achievement AwardDavid Benedict accepts the Thomas E. Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award
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We’re back with another podcast, and this time we’re coming back to the studio production of The Passion of Frankenstein. Remember, you can get this production in all its glory, with CD quality sound instead of the heavy compression we put on the podcast tracks, right here!
Also, just like the last time we used the studio production, we have no photos from that show, so we’re bringing you more from the LibertyCon show.
The LibertyCon cast for Frankenstein!Matt Goodson as Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Where did he get his PhD, anyway?The best Foley team in all of existence. In this case it’s real FrankenFoley!
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Continuing our presentation of Thomas E. Fuller’s powerhouse, The Passion of Frankenstein, this month we bring you a performance from LibertyCon 2015.
As we’ve mentioned several times, the script is like an irresistable force, bearing down on the audience and hitting them with a heady blend of emotion, horror, and intense sound effects. The piece is vocally challenging for our actors. When we decided to bring the performance to World Horror Convention, we knew we couldn’t just perform it once but we also knew that the actors’ voices might never be the same if they had to perform it as many times in a row as we were planning.
So for LibertyCon 2015 we switched up the cast. We hope you enjoy this segment that features several performers brand new to ARTC!
The cast and crew of “The Passion of Frankenstein” for LibertyCon 2015And this is what happens when the director loses control of the performers.
We’re also bringing you the preview of our upcoming new release, Blues for Johnny Raven! Be sure to check out the IndieGogo campaign to see how you can help us make the CD available to YOU!
Continuing our look back at ARTC’s 31 years (thusfar!) with photos from our live performances. You can get a look at our whole history of combining adventures in sound with the thrill of live performance in our Chronology!
In this installment we bring you our appearance at the Academy Theatre in October 2010 where we performed The Last Dragon to Avondale along with The House Across the Way, featuring music by Brad Weage and Paul Mercer, and Rory Rammer, Space Marshal: The Colour of the Shadow of the Outsider Over the Mountains of Madness Out of Space. This performance was a benefit for Georgia Aquarium (it was one of our first benefit performances, in fact!) and also included special musical guest Rooke! Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
In 2010 we debuted our Partners in Imagination program, which strives to harness the power of multiple non-profit groups into something stronger by raising awareness amongst our various audiences and maybe even a little money as well.
Psst…there’s not a lot of money in this…at least not yet.
We had originally wanted to do this benefit for Georgia Aquarium with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it became apparent very quickly that the script wouldn’t be ready in time, so we switched gears to The Last Dragon to Avondale. We felt that its focus on an “endangered species” made it a great fit.
“You keep telling yourself that, ok?”
Plus, we’d been performing at the Academy Theatre in Avondale Estates for a while at this point and to NOT perform this piece there would have been a crime against … well, a crime against something. Dragons, maybe.
We got a good turnout, too!
We also had the privilege of working with some amazing musicians on this piece. There was Brad Weage.
The very serious Brad Weage
Paul Mercer on violin. This was Paul’s first appearance with us!
The equally serious Paul Mercer
And our special musical guest, Rooke! Rooke has been around since the late 1980s and play a kind of (in their words) acid folk. We couldn’t quite get the whole band for this show, but we were thrilled to get Steven Sams, David Cater, and Keena Graham!
Continuing our look back at ARTC’s 31 years (thusfar!) with photos from our live performances. You can get a look at our whole history of combining adventures in sound with the thrill of live performance in our Chronology!
In this installment we bring you our appearance at the Academy Theatre in October 2010 where we performed The Island of Dr. Moreau, featuring music by The Ghosts Project, along with Inhuman Rights, Rory Rammer, Space Marshal: Set Loose the Dogs of Time, and Bumpers Crossroads: The Stray Dog. This performance was a benefit for the Atlanta Humane Society and also included special musical guest Julie Gribble! Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
Ok, first up, we know that using The Island of Dr. Moreau as a benefit for the Atlanta Humane Society sounds like a sick joke.
Really sick.
But the truth was that we thought it was a perfect choice to highlight the plight of animals. While it’s true that nobody is trying to turn animals into humans surgically…
THAT WE KNOW OF…
…animals still face serious challenges every day due to neglect, maltreatment, habitat loss, and various other challenges. We wanted to help, and we felt that one of H. G. Wells’s more shocking stories might assist with that.
And goodness knows we can use all the help we can get.
This was also a musically packed performance. In addition to the usual brilliance of Alton Leonard, we were thrilled to be graced with The Ghosts Project!
There they are, lurking in the background. Try not to frighten them.
Not to mention our very special musical guest, Julie Gribble!
With suitably dramatic lighting
This performance also featured our Beast Men Chorus, led by Beastmistress Trudy Leonard.
Try not to let THEM frighten YOU. (click this image for a larger version)
Not to mention one of the more violent Foley performances in ARTC’s history, involving a rubber mallet and a rather unfortunate butternut squash, used to simulate the cracking of the pantherwoman’s skull.
Before (front)Before (back) (it saw what happened to its predecessors…)The dastardly deedThe evidence of the crime
Be sure to come see more crimes against produce as we mangle a grapefruit in our upcoming performances of The Passion of Frankenstein!
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As we mentioned last month, we’re bringing you The Passion of Frankensteinin five parts and will be showcasing a different performance for at least the first four. We hope. We haven’t performed two of these yet and if the recording devices fail (it’s happened) then we might have to improvise. Part five will probably include the best performance of those scenes, but who knows? We might surprise ourselves.
Surprise!
This month we’re bringing you a section of the studio recording that we did at Audio Craft Studio back in 2002. This is what we refer to as the “original cast”. The pictures in this entry are still from World Horror Convention 2015, though, because we don’t have any pictures from any of the other performances yet. Talk to us after LibertyCon and Dragon Con. So the picture below of Thomas E. Fuller and Henry Howard at Audio Craft will have to do.
Thomas Fuller and Henry Howard admire an issue of the Centauri Express audio magazine at Audio Craft Studio
The studio recording was, literally, a monster to produce. The rich soundscape we talked about in last month’s entry is difficult to produce live, but surely in the studio it’s easier, right? Wrong.
What do you mean it’s not easier??
First, in the studio the standards are higher. Live audiences are very forgiving (thank goodness!), but once it’s on a recording all the little flaws stick out, so there’s a lot of precision work that has to get done. And the music, which in a live performance has a little bit of ebb and flow and adjustment to it, had to get timed out to the second to make the scenes work the way they were supposed to.
And then there was the review process.
“Our opinion of that draft of the recording might be at the bottom of this bucket. Or maybe it’s under it.”
See, this was back in the early 2000s when the Internet was only barely a thing for the general public. Cloud storage didn’t exist. Websites were hosted on Angelfire and Geocities. And CD-R technology wasn’t even remotely as reliable as it is now. We couldn’t just create an mp3, put it on a server somewhere, and have beta listeners download it and give feedback. We had to try to gather everyone together at the same time and have a listening party. On one memorable occasion we had all the relevant parties in the room…and the CD wouldn’t play. And burning another one would have involved an hour of driving and probably 30 minutes to actually burn the disk. So we all went home.
Continuing our look back at ARTC’s 31 years (thusfar!) with photos from our live performances. You can get a look at our whole history of combining adventures in sound with the thrill of live performance in our Chronology!
In this installment we bring you our appearance at Dragon Con 2010 (Sunday night edition) where we presented Time and Time Again by H. Beam Piper, adapted by Ron N. Butler and At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft, adapted by Thomas E. Fuller, and featuring music by The Ghosts Project. Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
It’s a short update this week, folks, as I am flying out to Kansas City, MO, later today to attend the HEAR Now Festival. But this was a momentous show because it marked the beginning of our long-standing relationship with The Ghosts Project, who have since gone on to play with us on several other productions, including The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Rats in the Walls!
It’s completely mind-blowingThe Ghosts Project, Paul Mercer and Davis Petterson“Don’t forget, you can own this recording of this historic performance.”
Continuing our look back at ARTC’s 31 years (thusfar!) with photos from our live performances. You can get a look at our whole history of combining adventures in sound with the thrill of live performance in our Chronology!
In this installment we bring you our appearance at the Academy Theatre in Avondale Estates, which featured our 2009 performance of Blues for Johnny Raven by Thomas E. Fuller. Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
Ok, so it’s April and some people probably aren’t over last Christmas yet, but hey, it’s almost Easter so let’s get back into the holiday spirit with pictures from An Atlanta Christmas 2009!
Brad Weage hitting all the right notes.Write your own caption. We dare you.Christmas, yo!A decent portion of the cast. The indecent portion is still backstage.The original beanie babies. And a giant snore.It’s INTENSE! OOOH, YEAH!Hooray! …or whatever they were saying at the time.
Continuing our look back at ARTC’s 31 years (thusfar!) with photos from our live performances. You can get a look at our whole history of combining adventures in sound with the thrill of live performance in our Chronology!
In this installment we bring you our appearance at the Academy Theatre in Avondale Estates, which featured our 2009 performance of Blues for Johnny Raven by Thomas E. Fuller. Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
This was our 25th Anniversary performance, and so we really went all out, as they say.
Bill Kronick and Alton Leonard going “all out”.
Y’know, we talk about how surprising it is that we’ve lasted so long. But the truth is that good storytelling is and has always been valued, so it really shouldn’t be that surprising.
Ok, maybe it’s a little surprising.
This performance featured some of our favorites, some blasts from the past, and was a ton of fun. We got to see our founder William Brown take the stage again to recite The Mountain Whippoorwill by Stephen Vincent Benet…
You don’t often see someone playing the “air violin”.
…as well as one of our favorite Rory Rammer episodes: The Asteroid of Love.
Featuring the beautiful Android Sisters!
We were also treated to Brad Strickland’s An Arkham Home Companion.
Brad Strickland, just telling a regular old story about a tentacled monster trying to steal an eldritch book.
We were also joined by our frequent musical guest Juliana Finch!
Juliana rocks harder than you.
And, lest we forget, the main attraction, Blues for Johnny Raven!
Raven (Daniel Kiernan) listens to the case brought to him by Gloria Kinsolving (Fiona Leonard).Raven (Daniel Kiernan) consults with his friend and informant, Benny the Gospel (Brad Strickland)Mary Buchanan takes a break from playing the sax.We have no idea what’s going on in this picture.
Blues for Johnny Raven is in the final stages of post-production now and will be available soon, first by download and later on CD!
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 for a look at our 30 (and counting!) years of live performance!
This week we bring you our appearance at the Academy Theatre for An Atlanta Christmas 2008. Check out all the pictures on our Flickr album.
What else can we say about Christmas? We just finished up our 2014 edition of An Atlanta Christmas, its 15th consecutive year of production, and it’s always a fun time. It’s kind of interesting how we crave newness and novelty all year long, but around the holidays we get all nostalgic and don’t mind listening to the same songs (or audio dramas!) that we’ve heard a dozen times before.
Case in point.
But it’s such a fun time! The reds! The greens! The getting to see people you haven’t seen in forever! The trying to cram in as much activity as possible while also shopping for people you suddenly realize you don’t know well enough and trying to live your normal life as well!
There’s a lot to do, is what we’re saying.
Plus, it’s different every year, while also staying the same. We shuffle the scripts around, we get new kids when the old ones get too big (everything gets exchanged just after Christmas, even actors).
Especially actors.
So we’ve put the wraps on Christmas for another year, but we’ll be back next year. And there’s still more Christmas pictures to post (we’re only up to 2008, after all). So, who knows? Maybe you’ll see Christmas in July.
But hopefully not wearing these outfits, unless you’re in the Southern hemisphere.
The 2008 production will live on in our hearts. We welcomed new performers. We made new memories. We refreshed ourselves. We did it again in 2009 all the way through 2014. And we’ll do it again in 2015.
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