Best Adam Colman Podcasts (2024)

1
Completing the Canon: Barry Edelstein on The Old Globe's Henry 6 37:34

26m ago37:34

37:34

This summer San Diego’s Old Globe became one of only 10 theaters in America who have produced all of Shakespeare’s plays (or 11, depending on how you count it) with their production of Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3. Artistic Director Barry Edelstein shares the details of how they tackled staging three rarely seen works with more than 150 characters, …

1
Colman Domingo on Sing Sing and the Power of Theater 30:10

14d ago30:10

30:10

Can a musical comedy featuring Hamlet and Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger change lives? Actor, playwright, and director Colman Domingo thinks so. In Sing Sing, a new film from A24, Domingo stars in a true story about the power of theater. Inspired by the real-life Rehabilitation through the Arts program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison…

1
The Brief Life and Big Impact of the Federal Theatre Project, with James Shapiro 36:36

28d ago36:36

36:36

Imagine: a fiercely idealistic, politically progressive artist takes the stand at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The chair of the committee is a hard-right demagogue with a gift for sound bites and a fixation with Communism. If you’re picturing Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s… think two decades earlie…

1
A Tour of the Newly-Reopened Folger | Part 2: Research at the Folger 31:13

1M ago31:13

31:13

After a four-year renovation, the Folger Shakespeare Library is now open with 12,000 square feet of new public spaces. But behind the scenes, in our original building, we’ve also revamped the way we serve researchers working with the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. On this episode, host Barbara Bogaev talks with Director of Collections Greg…

1
A Tour of the Newly-Reopened Folger | Part 1 34:04

2M ago34:04

34:04

On June 21, the Folger reopens after a four-year renovation. The reimagined Folger has brand-new public exhibition spaces where we can introduce visitors to Shakespeare and his plays, as well as showcase some of the treasures of the Folger’s collection. Behind the scenes in the original building, we’ve also completely revamped the way we serve rese…

1
Fred Wilson on his New, Othello-Inspired Work for the Folger 33:45

2M ago33:45

33:45

Fred Wilson’s artistic output includes painting, sculpture, photography, and collage, among other media. But his 1992 work “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society used the museum’s own collection as its material, radically reframing how American institutions present their art. Wilson went on to represent the United States at the 2003…

1
5.5 The Short Story in the U.S.: Otherworldly Bedtime Stories 25:31

3M ago25:31

25:31

The word “story” often comes after the word “bedtime,” and for good reason. Stories can frighten us, disturb and shock us, prompt us to change our thinking, but compared to most experiences, reading a story is tranquil. Podcasts, similarly conveying mediated encounters with other lives, are also used as sleep aids (there’s a “sleep” category in App…

1
Second Chances, Shakespeare, and Freud, with Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt 35:45

3M ago35:45

35:45

The desire for a second chance provides the engine for many of Shakespeare’s plays. In their new book, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and psychologist Adam Phillips argue that this fascination with the second chance links Shakespeare with one of his biggest 20th century fans: Sigmund Freud. Shakespeare…

1
5.4 The Short Story in the U.S.: NYC+MFA+ATL 37:25

3M ago37:25

37:25

“If my college-age self, reading White Noise, had thought I would one day be discussing word placement with Don DeLillo, I would have had a heart attack,” Deborah Treisman says in this episode. Since those days, in her role as fiction editor at The New Yorker, she has indeed discussed word placement with Don DeLillo, whose stories include “Midnight…

1
5.3 The Short Story in the U.S.: It's Weird 20:53

3M ago20:53

20:53

American short stories started out weird. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne, as we just did in episode two this season—or, consider Edgar Allan Poe. Existential strangeness and cosmic peril pervade these nineteenth-century stories, and those moods have stayed with American short stories into the twenty-first century. Brevity can be crucial for such stor…

1
Mary Zimmerman on Adapting Ovid and Directing Shakespeare 32:21

3M ago32:21

32:21

When Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was on Broadway in 2002, it won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel awards for best play. Zimmerman took home the Tony award for best director. This spring, director Psalmayene 24 and an all-Black cast stage a new production of the play interpreted thr…

1
5.2 The Short Story in the U.S.: Wake Up with Wakefield 37:35

4M ago37:35

37:35

It’s time for a story. In this episode of our season on short stories in the United States, you'll hear Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mysterious short story “Wakefield,” read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It’s a story from the 1830s, reflecting from the first sentence the early American interest in strange information found repeatedly in periodicals, and …

1
5.1 The Short Story in the U.S.: Introduction 29:39

4M ago29:39

29:39

The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new season is no exception. Still, there's a difference: we're prompted now by more than one major work. In season five, we're talking about short stories in the United States. You’ll hear from New Yorker…

1
Judi Dench On Seven Decades of Shakespeare, with Brendan O’Hea 40:56

4M ago40:56

40:56

In her new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Dame Judi Dench and actor/director Brendan O'Hea chat about her long history with the Bard. On this episode, Dench and O'Hea join host Barbara Bogaev to talk about Dench's experiences playing Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Titania. Plus, parrots, Polonius, dirty words, Ian McKellen, why …

1
Shakespeare and the Environment, with Todd Andrew Borlik 33:47

4M ago33:47

33:47

Land enclosure. Wildlife management. Erosion. Pollution. Mining practices. Today, we’d call these environmental issues. But, hundreds of years before the modern environmental movement coalesced, these issues also appeared in Shakespeare’s plays. We talk to Todd Andrew Borlik, a professor at the University of Huddersfield and author of Shakespeare B…

1
Season 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States 2:10

4M ago2:10

2:10

The trailer is here for the new season of The Cosmic Library! This five-episode season concerns a subject both smaller and vaster than any massive book, and that subject is: short stories in the United States. You’ll hear how short stories exceed their own brevity and meld with a reader’s mind; you’ll hear about the history of the short story acros…

1
Ramie Targoff on Women Writers of the English Renaissance 37:32

5M ago37:32

37:32

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents “Judith” Shakespeare, and concludes that this female genius would have been doomed.But that’s not the end of the story. If Woolf had read Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer (nee Bassano), Anne Clif…

1
Green World: Michelle Ephraim on Discovering Shakespeare and Reevaluating The Merchant of Venice 33:22

5M ago33:22

33:22

In her new memoir, "Green World," Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim tells the story of how she came to Shakespeare relatively late in her education. Although she didn’t grow up with Shakespeare, Ephraim became transfixed by "The Merchant of Venice" as a grad student. In particular, she found herself drawn to Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, and the …

1
Eddie Izzard on Performing Hamlet Solo 32:11

6M ago32:11

32:11

Eddie Izzard has a long record of dramatic roles. But it’s her decades of experience as a stand-up comedian that prepared Izzard for her recent solo shows—first Great Expectations, and now Hamlet at New York’s Greenwich House Theatre.From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published February 27, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights…

1
Shakespeare and Disgust, with Bradley J. Irish 34:30

6M ago34:30

34:30

Maybe there really was something rotten in Denmark. On this episode, we talk with Bradley J. Irish about disgust in Shakespeare. In his new book, Irish identifies the emotion, which combines physical revulsion and moral outrage, as one of the central thematic emotions in Shakespeare’s plays. In his close readings across the canon, Irish finds disgu…

1
Rita Dove on Shakespeare and Her Poem of Welcome for the Folger 37:06

7M ago37:06

37:06

When the Folger reopens on June 21 and you come to take a walk in our new west garden, look down at the garden bed. There, you'll see a new poem, written for the Folger by US Poet Laureate emerita Rita Dove. This week, she joins us on the podcast to read that poem aloud for the first time. Plus, Dove reflects on how writing for marble is different …

1
John Guy And Julia Fox on Their New Biography of Anne Boleyn 33:44

7M ago33:44

33:44

Even after appearing in a Shakespeare play, historical romance novels, a Broadway musical, and prestige TV dramas, there's still more to learn about Anne Boleyn.A new biography by the team of husband-and-wife historians John Guy and Julia Fox takes a scholarly look at the evidence surrounding Anne’s rise and fall. They freshly examine well-known ac…

1
David and Ben Crystal Share Shakespeare Quotations for Your Everyday Life 35:13

7M ago35:13

35:13

Shakespeare has the perfect lines for riding into battle or stumbling around a stormy heath. But does he have the right stuff to take us on a daily commute or a trip to the grocery store? On this episode, David and Ben Crystal join us to talk about their new book, "Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life," which offers daily Shakespeare quotes you can…

1
What Happened to the Princes in the Tower, with Philippa Langley 33:25

8M ago33:25

33:25

The most unforgivable crime in Richard III has to be when the king orders the murder of his two young nephews, Edward and Richard. But what if Richard III was framed?Philippa Langley is the amateur historian whose commitment to righting a historical wrong led to the discovery of Richard III’s remains a decade ago. Langley wasn’t a scholar—she was a…

1
Will Somer: Peter K. Andersson on Henry VIII's Court Fool 31:20

8M ago31:20

31:20

What comes to mind when you think about a "court jester?" What if we told you that fools in the Tudor court didn’t look or sound anything like the zany clowns you have in mind?Historians don’t know much about Will Somer. We know he was Henry VIII’s court fool, but the details of his biography—and, crucially, his comedy—were never recorded.By Shakes…

1
Isabelle Schuler on Lady Macbeth and Queen Hereafter 30:58

9M ago30:58

30:58

Isabelle Schuler’s debut novel Queen Hereafter attempts to fill in a backstory for Lady Macbeth. The book takes place in 11th century Scotland, where a king’s reign tended to be short and brutal. For her version of Lady M, Schuler didn’t rely on Shakespeare or his source material, Holinshed’s Chronicles. Instead, she looked to the annals and sagas …

1
400 Years of Shakespeare's First Folio, with Emma Smith 29:22

9M ago29:22

29:22

The First Folio—the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays—hit bookstores 400 years ago this November. Emma Smith of Oxford University tells us just what this famous book has been up to for the past four centuries. We explore notable collectors like Sir Edward Dering and our founders, Emily and Henry Folger; how the 18th-century slave trade…

1
The Bloomsbury Group and Shakespeare, with Marjorie Garber 31:05

10M ago31:05

31:05

We talk with Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber about how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury Group made Shakespeare their own. Garber’s most recent book—her twentieth—is Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. In it, she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, that circle of early 20th-century intellectuals included nove…

1
Patrick Stewart on a Life Shaped by Shakespeare 31:34

10M ago31:34

31:34

Sir Patrick Stewart joins us on the podcast to talk about how Shakespeare has shaped his life. Stewart tells host Barbara Bogaev about his Yorkshire youth, his audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Starfleet Captain Jen-Luc Picard, and more.Stewart's memoir, "Making It So," is available now from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Sc…

1
Michael Patrick Thornton on Learning to Breathe Again with Shakespeare 29:58

11M ago29:58

29:58

Sometimes, the beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry takes your breath away. In the case of today’s guest, Shakespeare gave him his breath back.You may recognize actor Michael Patrick Thornton from his roles on TV series like Private Practice and The Good Doctor. Twenty years ago, Thornton had just started out in his acting career when he suffered two spi…

1
The Many Lives of John Donne with Katherine Rundell 34:28

11M ago34:28

34:28

We talk with author Katherine Rundell about the extraordinary life —or should we say lives? — of John Donne, who wrote some of the 17th century’s most complex and intellectually dazzling poetry. Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and the author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne takes us through Donne’s evolution from …

1
Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steve Mentz 33:18

12M ago33:18

33:18

Today, we sail the seven seas with Shakespeare. In addition to being a dedicated swimmer, Steve Mentz is a professor at St. John’s University. His books, including 2009’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, connect literary criticism with marine ecology. Mentz talks with Barbara Bogaev about Shakespeare’s oceanic metaphors, how much Shakespeare r…

1
Farah Karim-Cooper on The Great White Bard 32:18

12M ago32:18

32:18

Can you love Shakespeare and be an antiracist?Farah Karim-Cooper's new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest. Karim-Cooper also looks at the ways Shakespeare’s work became integral to Britain’s imperial project, and its sense of cultural supe…

1
Isabella Hammad on Enter Ghost 32:39

1y ago32:39

32:39

A Palestinian production of Hamlet in the West Bank is the backdrop for Isabella Hammad’s new novel, Enter Ghost. Hammad’s first novel, the beautiful and sprawling The Parisian, won international acclaim in 2019. Granta included Hammad in its decennial “Best of Young British Novelists” list earlier this year. The narrator of Hammad’s new novel is S…

1
Mat Osman's The Ghost Theatre Imagines the Lives of Elizabethan London's Child Actors 31:37

1y ago31:37

31:37

Mat Osman's new novel, The Ghost Theatre, takes us flying over the rooftops of Elizabethan London and down into the gritty lives of its child actors. A historical novel set in a vibrant and sensuously reimagined Elizabethan London, the book's main character is Shay, the daughter of a clairvoyant who lives among a community who worship birds. When S…

1
Adrian Lester on Playing Rosalind, Henry V, Othello, and Hamlet 36:55

1y ago36:55

36:55

We could listen to Adrian Lester talk about acting all day… but he's a busy man, so we’ll settle for this 37 minute episode. The actor joins us to discuss some of his most famous performances, including Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s acclaimed 1991 all-male As You Like It, Hamlet with Peter Brook, and Henry V and Othello with Nicholas Hytner. Plus, Le…

1
4.5 The Hall of the Monkey King: Immortality 27:29

1y ago27:29

27:29

Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you’ll hear about Journey to the West’s capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King's own openness, his playfulness. Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey's actions and …

1
4.4 The Hall of the Monkey King: Cinematic Transcendence 20:56

1y ago20:56

20:56

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a sixteenth-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the sixteenth century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the …

1
Greg Doran on Forty Years of Directing Shakespeare 35:44

1y ago35:44

35:44

On today’s episode, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s former Artistic Director takes a look back at four decades of staging Shakespeare. Greg Doran’s career as a Shakespearean director began in the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. By the time he stepped down as the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company earlier this year, Doran had dir…

1
4.3 The Hall of the Monkey King: The Flawed Mind Monkey 28:41

1y ago28:41

28:41

You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all t…

1
4.2 The Hall of the Monkey King: Lawful Chaos 28:37

1y ago28:37

28:37

Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sin…

1
David West Read on & Juliet 29:20

1y ago29:20

29:20

Start with Shakespeare’s "star-crossed" lovers and fold in the songs of Swedish pop hitmaker Max Martin… what do you get? The hit Broadway musical & Juliet, currently running at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York and nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical.The show imagines what would happen if Juliet…

1
4.1 The Hall of the Monkey King: Introduction 21:40

1y ago21:40

21:40

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests inc…

1
Season 4 Trailer: The Hall of the Monkey King 2:59

1y ago2:59

2:59

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the …

1
Robert O'Hara on Directing Richard III 33:42

1y ago33:42

33:42

Robert O’Hara joins us to talk about directing last year’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III, starring Danai Gurira of Marvel's "Black Panther." He tells us about gathering a diverse cast of actors with disabilities, wanting to “trigger” his audiences, and what it’s like to get a call about directing Shakespeare in the Park (spoiler…

1
Publishing Shakespeare's First Folio, with Chris Laoutaris 29:01

1+ y ago29:01

29:01

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Eighteen of those plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, had never been published before they appeared in the First Folio, which means that without it, they might have been lost.But how did the First Folio co…

1
Lolita Chakrabarti on Adapting Hamnet for the Stage 35:58

1+ y ago35:58

35:58

Lolita Chakrabarti is the playwright of Red Velvet, about 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge, and has adapted Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi for the stage. Now, she has adapted Maggie O'Farrell's bestselling novel Hamnet for the stage. Hamnet is currently playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre.…

1
James Ijames on Fat Ham 32:54

1+ y ago32:54

32:54

Hamlet has been adapted, retold, and reinvented countless ways. But you’ve never seen a version of Hamlet quite like James Ijames’s Fat Ham, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and is now playing on Broadway. In Fat Ham, Ijames takes the outline of Hamlet and transposes it to the present day American South. Instead of “funeral baked meats,”…

1
Marion Turner on The Wife of Bath: A Biography 34:49

1+ y ago34:49

34:49

In her book The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Marion Turner reacquaints us with a remarkable, vital character: Alison, Wife of Bath, the most famous fictional pilgrim in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Turner puts Alison into her historical context in 14th- and 15th-century England and the literary tradition, arguing that the Wife of Bath is lite…

1
Patrick Page on King Lear and Shakespeare's Villains 40:41

1+ y ago40:41

40:41

You might recognize Patrick Page from films like Spirited, or shows like The Gilded Age, or from his Broadway roles as Hades in Hadestown for which he was nominated for a Tony. But Page is also an accomplished Shakespearean, with a long relationship with Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he’s played Prospero, Macbeth, Coriolanus, …

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