Theater History and Mysteries

Dr. Jon Bruschke, PhD
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The deepest dives you can find anywhere into the history and backstory of the great musical productions.  Dense content...for people who aren't.  And, I’ll never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Gentley, it is all connected. You can contact me directly at theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com Released every other Tuesday.  Music by Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat, arranged, performed, and recorded by Andrew Howat. Check out the interview on Musical Theater Radio, episode 404: https://www.musicaltheatreradio.com/podcast

  1. JAN 27

    What does Hadestown say about race and gender? (Hadestown 6/8, episode 35)

    Send us a text Are there crazy connections in the world?  In 1984 I was a 4th-year college debater at Cal. State Fullerton with aspirations of finishing in the top 16 in the country when my partner quit.  In January I was paired up with a sophomore, and we needed an argument nobody else was talking about…right when a change of power in Egypt put Hosni Mubarak in the geopolitical spotlight.  We based our entire argument strategy on how various government actions might mess up that transition and the global impact it would have.  In our sophomoric tone, common to 20-year-old males and strangely tolerated in the world of competitive academic debate, we labelled the argument “You hose Hosni.”  The basic claim was that the regime was fragile, and easily disrupted. In what must have been very close to that same year, Anais Mitchell – who would go on to write Hadestown – had this experience, which she recounted in her book “Working on a song” – In college I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt.  May Arabic Lit professor was an older woman with dark eyeliner who took it upon herself ot introduce leftist, bohemian values to a generate of distracted young Egyptians.  She barely concealed her disdain for then-President Hosni Mubarak” Both the Arabic Lit professor and our undergraduate drivel were proven right by history!  In February of 2011, Mubarak was ousted from power following violent protests… Unlike Hosni Mubarak, both Anais Mitchell and, in a far less spectacular way, I understood that the world was changing.  The future would not belong to autocrats, but to those who explored the emerging concerns of that bohemian, mobile-phone using generation: Race, gender, the environment, and the working class.  This is where the revolution lies, and this is where it’s dangerous to light the match.  So we’ll use of phone flashlights as we look at race, gender, and the environment as the issues play out in this episode of THM. Rosalind Henderson https://medium.com/@rosalindhenderson_54321/toxic-masculinity-a-leading-cause-of-our-environmental-issues-d2e9d6fb58bf Support the show

    1h 2m

  2. JAN 13

    Hadestown...and autism (Hadestown 5/8, episode 34)

    Send us a text Hadestown Episode 5 script – Autism In my favorite episode of this show, I went to the Phantom of the Opera sites on Facebook and asked people what they thought about the show and why it worked for them.  The follow-up question was whether they would come on to the show and speak about their experiences.   Of the responses I got, a surprising number of folks identified that they were neuroatypical.  I didn’t even know that was true of them until they told me.  But descriptions of hyperfocus and late-life diagnoses were, honestly, more powerful than most of the topics we have delved into on this show. I can’t really say how much I respected those people and the stories they shared.  I don’t want to present their lives like I have some master understanding of the issue, but I do think that just listening to what they had to say rounded out who they were as people and provided a whole new depth to what neurodivergence is and, importantly for this show, how it relates to theater. This series, however, is about Hadestown, not the Phantom.  The big bad isn’t a shunned creature who lurks in the shadows, but a god who rules over one-third of the universe and is in charge of hell itself.  The central character isn’t a warped man living in the catacombs, it is the beautiful, naïve poet who still believes he can change the world with a song. Imagine my delight when I found in the hallowed pages of the academic journal Studies in Musical Theater an article with the title: Hadestown’s Orpheus: The autistic hero musical theatre didn’t know it needed I didn’t know I needed it on this podcast, but here we are! What is the connection between autism and Hadestown?  Does it play out in the actual plot?  Was it part of Anais Mitchell’s rewriting of the Orpheus character as the show developed?  We’ll crack the cover and leaf through the pages together on this episode of THM. Support the show

    56 min

  3. 12/30/2025

    The Big Song in Hadestown -- Epic 3 (Hadestown 4/8, episode 33)

    Send us a text Hadestown Episode 4 script – The song (Epic 3) What does it mean to be a tortured genius?   Does it mean getting your show to Broadway, and finding yourself unable to get out of bed one day, crushed by the weight of all the things that happen because of your work?   Maybe.  And that happened to Dale Wasserman, the author of the Man of La Mancha. Does it mean you wander around inside your own head, unable to tune out the art and music and math and magic inside your own cranium, also unable to conquer and control it?   Maybe.  And we’ll see one of those is a character in HT. Does it mean that you find yourself curled up in bed, knowing that you need to fix a song, working yourself past the point of exhaustion and insomnia and reason, unable to sleep, unable to stay awake, but more than anything, unable to stop working on a song? Mabye.  And that happened to the author of HT, Anais Mitchell. Why is it so important to have that one song, the one that fits perfectly, that makes the show?  Why was this the demon that stalked both Jonathan Larson and Anais Mitchell?  We’ll find out this episode of THM. Support the show

    49 min

  4. 12/16/2025

    Mitchell's version of the Orpheus story compared to Virgil and Ovid (Hadestown 3/8, episode 32)

    Send us a text The ancient poet Virgil died of a fever with his master work still unfinished…and it was left to his executors to finish the work.  The book was the Aeneid, and it would be, in its time, the definitive work on the founding myths and stories of the Roman state.  This would cement his role as the greatest poet of his day, and it is a legacy that has never died.  Virgil is still read today.   But the stories he told were his own adaptations.  His version of Orpheus was different from that of Homer and Euripides.  He wasn’t even re-telling the story so much as inventing it. He was followed by Ovid, who would also have impacts at a historic level.  His books, too, are still read, and his contributions, too, carried on the Greek and Roman tradition in a way that is still recognizable today.  And he, too, told the story in his own way.  Scholars would write that he very consciously not only adapted the ancient stories for his own use, he would take VIRGIL’S story and freely change them for his own use. And twenty centuries later, a folk musician named Anais Mitchell would take this great story, powerfully carried forward in these two great works, and do what Virgil and Ovid had both done: Told their own story, in their own way, to make the story ring true for their audiences. What changes did Mitchell make, and why did she make them?  Did she ever ask “Who am I to think that I can hold my head up higher than my fellow humans?”  Could this modern bard write something that would improve on Virgil and Ovid.  She sure did, and we’ll find out how in this episode of THM. Support the show

    1h 12m

  5. 12/03/2025

    The Story of Orpheus -- Virgil vs. Ovid (Hadestown 2/8, episode 31)

    Send us a text The Romans stand at a key moment in human civilization.  Starting with roots in Greece, they are looking back at the Trojan war, they are thinking about their gods.  They have founded the first university in the western tradition.  And they are modifying and inheriting a series of explanations for the world. Where does the wind come from?  What controls the oceans, or causes lightning, or earthquakes?  Why do the seasons pass? What is nature like? Their answers, at least in part, involve the gods.  And they have been engaging those gods.  They have prayed to them, made sacrifices to them, asked them for favors.  And the gods, looking down, have picked their favorite champions, and intercede arbitrarily and for self-serving reasons in the affairs of humans. But now, just before the birth of Jesus, there is a Roman poet who comes up with a totally different take.  In his story, there is a mortal, who will try an entirely different way to earning the favor of the gods.   He will sing to them.  And this will open an entirely new way to look at the ancient Greek and Roman myths…and start a new way of thinking that will trace through history, to the earliest operas, and the fable of Robert Johnson playing for the devil at a crossroads, to Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown. We’ll look back at that story today, on this episode of THM. Support the show

    1 hr

  6. 11/18/2025

    The Greek Mythology behind Hadestown -- Hadestown (1/8, episode 30).

    Send us a text In ancient Rome, there is a poet.  What we now call western civilization is just beginning to find its first roots take hold … there’s an academy, and Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle are writing books that will be read for centuries.  In fact, books that we still read and talk and think about today.  And in this line, just around the time of Jesus, is our poet. His star is rising, then crossed.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica documents his rise: “No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 ce the Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published” The poet doesn’t yet know the impact that his work will have; he can only know that his work is just now complete.  It’s fate, like that of the heroes he’s writing about, is not to get to a final destination unscathed.  Brittanica continues: “and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor.” The work would have to be finished in exile.  And the travails would not end there; the emperor would ban his books from public libraries.  He would write his own autobiography…the title would be “sorrow.” But history has a way of turning a censor’s work to folly; you can try to ban books but you can’t stop ideas, and when a good book finds it’s audience that genie won’t go back in the bottle.  I’ll keep reading from the Brittanica entry; our poet’s “chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality…It is those things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.”   Really, Ezra Pound?  Ew…yuck.  That dude was a racist monster who sucked in all the ways our poet did not. The poet’s name was Ovid, the 12th and 13th centuries are called the “age of Ovid,” and he flourished again in the Renaissance. The book he wrote was called Metamorpheses, and in there is the tale of Orpheus and Eurdyce.  Among those who would not share the Emperor’s scorn for the work was Anais Mitchell, who would pick up the tale in 2006 and turn it into a Broadway smash hit a decade later. And today, we’ll learn where that story came from. Support the show

    42 min

  7. 11/11/2025 · BONUS

    Intermission episode -- Interview with Superteacher Michael Despars (1/1, Epsiode 29)

    Send us a text Normally we release every other Tuesday, but this is our first special episode that uses the more traditional podcasting interview format.  This off-week episode comes just in-between Jesus Christ Superstar and Hadestown, which will start next week. *               *                 *                *                  * Imagine a scared kid going to their first day of high school.  Maybe they’re new at the school and don’t have any friends yet, maybe they’re just a nerd and not all the cool kids are being nice, maybe they have some stuff going on at home and they’re nervous and uptight all the time. For it all to work out for these kids, something has to go right.  They walk into a room to start an activity that they barely know about, and it changes their life.  Maybe it’s a debate room, or a science class, or a high school paper newsroom.  And maybe…it’s a theater class. This has happened so often it’s actually a theme at the Tony’s.  When Elaine Strich won in 2002 she invited her high school drama teacher, Mr. Bodick.  When Neil Patrick Harris won for Hedwig he thanked both Churchill Cooke and Danny Flores.  He said “These are teachers in small town New Mexico who when sports was the only option, showed that creativity had a place in the world. Without them I would never be able to do any of this.” Melody Herzfeld, a high school drama teacher, got special recognition at the Tony Awards in 2018.  She was a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS, and she hid 65 students during the horrific shooting there. If the measure of a life is the impact it has on other lives, there is no doubt that one profession that may lead the pack in changing lives are high school drama teachers.  Before almost everyone who has made it to Broadway is someone who made it to Broadway, they were theater kids, and they wouldn’t have been there without theater teachers. And today we’re going to take a departure from our normal formula and talk to one of the best high school teachers, the FUSD’s Teacher on Special Assignment, Michael Despars. Support the show

    53 min

  8. 11/04/2025

    Superstar and the lost Gospel of Judas -- Jesus Christ Superstar (5 of 5; Episode 28)

    Send us a text It is the 4th century AD…Jesus has been dead for at least 300 years but the stories and ideas about him have not.  After having been persecuted for decades, and fed to lions in the Coliseum, the Christians are now becoming the dominant religion under the new emperor Constantine.  But they aren’t the only Christians, and they aren’t the only ones with ideas about who Jesus was, and who Judas was.  They are becoming the institution that would later start the inquisition, and torture and suppress every other form of thought. We aren’t there yet, but non-catholic ideas about Jesus are being actively suppressed. In upper Egypt, on the west banks of the Nile, there is a true believer in Gnosticism.  The gnostics have their own writings, their own theology, and even their own gospels.  And one of those Gospels is the gospel according to Judas.  And books like this are exactly the sort that Rome is seeking out to destroy. To protect these ideas, these books, and this knowledge, the gnostic believer takes his manuscripts, stores them in a clay container, and hides them away in a cave.  There they will sit for 15 centuries and when they are final discovered in the 1980s, and finally published in 2006, they will have the exact same approach to understanding the crucifixion that the musical JCS superstar launched only decades earlier.  What are we to make of that?  Let’s excavate together on this episode of THM. [Footnotes in episode 24] Support the show

    55 min
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About

The deepest dives you can find anywhere into the history and backstory of the great musical productions.  Dense content...for people who aren't.  And, I’ll never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Gentley, it is all connected. You can contact me directly at theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com Released every other Tuesday.  Music by Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat, arranged, performed, and recorded by Andrew Howat. Check out the interview on Musical Theater Radio, episode 404: https://www.musicaltheatreradio.com/podcast

Information

  • Creator
    Dr. Jon Bruschke, PhD
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    35
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Theater History and Mysteries
  • Show Website
    Theater History and Mysteries