Assassins Podcast Project
I love integrating theatre and technology. It’s exciting and rewarding to see how these two different worlds can work together. It’s tricky though. There is a temptation to find a way to incorporate technology into everything. But like all of the other elements of design, it does not make the show. I had been thinking about how to incorporate some of the real history of the events of Assassins into the production for almost two years now. I think it first struck me when I was talking to Jay Edelnant about Theatre UNI’s production of Marat/Sade.
In Jay’s production they gave the audience the option of giving the box office their cell phone number and they mass texted people during the play with historical info about the show. I cannot begin to tell you how excited the whole idea made me. Jay was very up front about the drawbacks. Particularly the fact that the carrier sometimes didn’t get the texts out immediately and sometimes texts would arrive hours after the show was over. Then there is the phones lighting up throughout the show.
Coming back to my college it didn’t take a lot of question asking to figure out that we were just not set up to send out mass texts here without paying a lot of money. I had actually planned to look into online texting services until I was talking to my Stage Manager last week.
Long story short. The Nashville Opera House has a history of doing podcasts about their productions and they are broadcast on the web. Well apparently for one particular production the director and the principle actors recorded a podcast along with the entirety of an upcoming show that audience members could listen too on their ipods while they watched the show.
The implications are staggering. This would allow us to offer the audiences the history that Sondheim leaves out as well as other information particular to our production. Spoken in the voices of our actors and myself. Interesting facts like how we made the break-away bottles, or how we created the shadow of the ferris wheel in the background. It’s just a matter of creating the podcast and making it available. And marketing it.
Of course, the first time you see the show, you don’t want to listen to the podcast. You want to enjoy the show. But we can offer a return ticket at a big discount so that you could come back (affordably) and watch the show with the podcast. This actually solves most of the Marat/Sade problems.
I’m sure it creates some new ones, but hey, doesn’t everything? I’ll keep you posted.
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