David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, filmmaker, and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). He first gained critical acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway 1970s plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His plays Race and The Penitent, respectively, opened on Broadway in 2009 and previewed off-Broadway in 2017.
Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatized works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the sound effects units of the BBC, created in 1958 to produce incidental sounds and new music for radio and, later, television. The unit is known for its experimental and pioneering work in electronic music and music technology, as well as its popular scores for programmes such as Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit during the 1950s and 1960s.
A radio dramatization of the original Star Wars film trilogy was produced in 1981, 1983, and 1996. The first two radio series, based on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, were produced and broadcast by National Public Radio (NPR) as part of NPR Playhouse. A dramatization of Return of the Jedi was produced by most of the same team and it was also broadcast on NPR.
John Philip Madden is an English director of stage, film, television, and radio. He is known for directing Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. He has also gained recognition for directing The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015).
Radio comedy, or comedic radio programming, is a radio broadcast that may involve variety show, sitcom elements, sketches, and various types of comedy found in other media. It may also include more surreal or fantastic elements, as these can be conveyed on a small budget with just a few sound effects or some simple dialogue. Radio comedy began in the United States in 1930, based on the fact that as most United Kingdom music hall comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel progressed to silent films, they moved to Hollywood and fed the radio comedy field. Another British music hall comic, George Formby, stayed in the British movie industry, and in 1940 joined the Entertainments National Service Association to entertain British World War II troops. UK radio comedy therefore started later, in the 1950s.
NPR Playhouse was a series of radio dramas from National Public Radio. The series was a successor to the NPR series Earplay and was discontinued in September 2002.
David George Dirk Maggs is a British freelance writer and director. During his career as a Senior Producer in BBC Radio he made radio drama adopting a cinematic-sounding approach, combining filmic story construction, layered sound effects, orchestral music and digital recording technology. Maggs introduced productions in Dolby Surround in BBC Radio and termed the result, "Audio Movies".
Joseph K. Bevilacqua is an American actor, producer, director, author, dramatist, humorist, cartoonist, and documentarian.
Organic Theater Company was founded in 1969 in Madison, Wisconsin by artistic director Stuart Gordon and his wife Carolyn Purdy Gordon.
Theatre Intime is an entirely student-run dramatic arts not-for-profit organization operating out of the Hamilton Murray Theater at Princeton University. Intime receives no direct support from the university, and is entirely acted, produced, directed, teched and managed by a board of students that is elected once a semester. "Students manage every aspect of Theatre Intime, from choosing the plays to setting the ticket prices."
National Public Radio broadcast a dramatization of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in 1979. It was produced by The Mind's Eye and has since been made available by several different companies. It was produced by Bob Lewis and adapted for radio by Bernard Mayes. The most widely circulated US edition comes in a wooden box, whether on compact discs or cassette tapes.
Wings is a 1978 play by American playwright Arthur Kopit. Originating as a radio play, it was later adapted for stage and screen.
Studio monitors are loudspeakers in speaker enclosures specifically designed for professional audio production applications, such as recording studios, filmmaking, television studios, radio studios and project or home studios, where accurate audio reproduction is crucial. Among audio engineers, the term monitor implies that the speaker is designed to produce relatively flat (linear) phase and frequency responses. In other words, it exhibits minimal emphasis or de-emphasis of particular frequencies, the loudspeaker gives an accurate reproduction of the tonal qualities of the source audio, and there will be no relative phase shift of particular frequencies—meaning no distortion in sound-stage perspective for stereo recordings. Beyond stereo sound-stage requirements, a linear phase response helps impulse response remain true to source without encountering "smearing". An unqualified reference to a monitor often refers to a near-field design. This is a speaker small enough to sit on a stand or desk in proximity to the listener, so that most of the sound that the listener hears is coming directly from the speaker, rather than reflecting off walls and ceilings. Monitor speakers may include more than one type of driver or, for monitoring low-frequency sounds, such as bass drum, additional subwoofer cabinets may be used.
The Water Engine is a 1977 play by David Mamet that centers on the violent suppression of a disruptive alternative energy technology.
Columbia Workshop was a radio series that aired on the Columbia Broadcasting System from 1936 to 1943, returning in 1946–47.
The Fall of the City by Archibald MacLeish is the first American verse play written for radio. The 30-minute radio play was first broadcast April 11, 1937, at 7 p.m. ET over the Columbia Broadcasting System as part of the Columbia Workshop radio series. The cast featured Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith. Music was composed and directed by Bernard Herrmann. It is an allegory on the rise of Fascism.
Bernard Gersten was an American theatrical producer. Beginning in the 1960s through the early 2000s, Gersten played a major role in shaping American drama and musical theatre.
Karl Schmidt was an American radio broadcaster from Wisconsin who created the radio drama series Earplay. Schmidt spent the majority of his career at station WHA and Wisconsin Public Radio. He began his career as a University of Wisconsin student at WHA in 1941, and later served in the military during World War II with Armed Forces Radio. After completing his degree at the University of Wisconsin, Schmidt pursued a career in radio drama in New York. Later, Schmidt returned to WHA to host and produce radio programs, and also served as director of the National Center for Audio Experimentation. He also held positions with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and NPR. In 1971, Schmidt created the radio drama series Earplay, which broadcast original plays and won several awards during its run, including a Peabody Award and the Prix Italia. Schmidt was also a reader for the WPR series Chapter a Day, appearing on the program from 1941 until his death in 2016. He was inducted into the Wisconsin Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2013.
Don Voegeli (1920-2009) was an American composer who created the theme music for the NPR radio news program All Things Considered. He attended the University of Wisconsin, during which time he volunteered at radio station WHA. In the 1940s, Voegeli led a big band, and went on to become a professor of music at the University of Wisconsin. He was also the Music Director for WHA from 1943 to 1964. From 1964 to 1967, Voegeli was WHA's Operations and Facilities Manager. In 1971, Voegeli created the theme for All Things Considered, which was updated in 1976 with another version also composed by Voegeli. The theme was composed on an EMS VCS 3 synthesizer. The project that resulted in the theme was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of the National Center for Audio Experimentation. Voegeli's son, Tom Voegeli, is an audio producer, and has worked on radio programs including WHA's Earplay and the radio dramatization of the Star Wars series.
