Podcast 70 - An Atlanta Christmas: "Civil War Triptych" - Episode 7

Welcome everyone to the last Christmas podcast of the year. We conclude the season with another very recent show, Sunday, December 23 to be exact. And we are proud to bring you a segment of An Atlanta Christmas that has never been presented before. "Civil War Triptych", written by Thomas E. Fuller, follows the Christmas stories of three characters, each with an entirely different situation and take on the season.

Again, technical reasons prevented me from including the performer's names in the audio, but they are Clair W. Kiernan, Veronica Byrd, and Jeff Montgomery. Assisting with the song at the end are Dawn Marie and Sarah Taylor. Special thanks to our performance coach, Doug Kaye.

Direct download: ARTC70-Xmas07.mp3

69 - An Atlanta Christmas - Episode 4 - Repeat

Hey, folks, sorry for the multiple repeats this year, but this holiday season is busy busy busy!! Live shows, paying work, shopping, parties...it all adds up. But fear not, new material is coming!

Our annual gift to our listeners continues with more excerpts from An Atlanta Christmas. This week we bring you three short pieces and another lovely song. We hope you enjoy it.

The Santa Claus Blues, by Thomas E. Fuller
Rory Rammer, Space Marshal: A Visit From St. Rex, by Ron N. Butler
The Tree Comes to Atlanta, by Thomas E. Fuller
O Holy Night, performed by the ARTC Chorus

Direct download: ARTC69Xmas04-R.mp3

68 - An Atlanta Christmas Episode 6

This week's episode is from an extremely recent show. Like this past weekend. Yes, from December 8, 2007 at 4pm to be exact, we present "Cut-Out Christmas" by Thomas E. Fuller, adapted for audio by Daniel Taylor and featuring the voices of Veronica Byrd and Burt Tanner. Foley effects created by Sonya with Caran Wilbanks. Music by Brad Weage.

Direct download: ARTC68-Xmas06.mp3

67 - An Atlanta Christmas part 1 - Repeat

Christmas is memories. For the next 4 podcasts, ARTC will be bringing you some of our favorite memories from our holiday programming, drawing heavily from Thomas E. Fuller's An Atlanta Christmas, but with a few other surprises along the way.

This week we bring you The Ultimate Christmas Pageant and O Tannenbaum by Thomas E. Fuller, and Some Assembly Required, by Daniel Taylor.

Direct download: ARTC67-Xmas01-R.mp3

Podcast 66 - Blazing the Trail of Tears part 2

Back in 2004 ARTC performed an outdoor show at Stone Mountain Park for their Frontier Days festival. We've brought you some of that material here in the podcast before and today we revisit it with Mike Langford's Blazing the Trail of Tears in two parts. The timing of this story for this podcast is not lost on us. It is not a proud part of Georgia or American history, but it is an important one. We hope you enjoy the presentation.

Direct download: ARTC66-Tears02.mp3

Podcast 65 - Blazing the Trail of Tears part 1

Back in 2004 ARTC performed an outdoor show at Stone Mountain Park for their Frontier Days festival. We've brought you some of that material here in the podcast before and today we revisit it with Mike Langford's Blazing the Trail of Tears in two parts. The timing of this story for this podcast is not lost on us. It is not a proud part of Georgia or American history, but it is an important one. We hope you enjoy the presentation.

Direct download: ARTC65-Tears01.mp3

64 - Blues for Johnny Raven

This week ARTC takes a well-deserved break from new podcast material, bringing you instead a re-run of one of our absolute favorite pieces, Blues for Johnny Raven by Thomas E. Fuller.

Size: 17M Duration: 37:04
Direct download: ARTC64-Blues-R.mp3

Podcast 63 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth part 5

This week we conclude our five part presentation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, adapted for audio by Thomas E. Fuller and Gregory Nicholl. It features the voice of legendary writer Harlan Ellison, as well as anime voice actor Michael Brady.

This was performed live at Dragon*Con 2004 and was part of our celebration of our 20th anniversary!

We hope you've enjoyed the last several weeks of podcasting. I've been including a wide selection of our adaptations. Beginning next week we will return to our original material and in December we will present once again selections from Thomas E. Fuller's An Atlanta Christmas...along with a few other seasonal favorites from our own in-house writers.

Our next live performances will be on Saturday, December 22 at 8:00pm and Sunday, December 23 at 2:30pm at the Stage Door Players in Dunwoody. Mark your calendars for our annual presentation of Thomas E. Fuller's An Atlanta Christmas.

Size: 5.7M Duration: 12:11

Link - Download

Podcast 62 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth part 4

This week we continue our five part presentation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, adapted for audio by Thomas E. Fuller and Gregory Nicholl. It features the voice of legendary writer Harlan Ellison, as well as anime voice actor Michael Brady.

This was performed live at Dragon*Con 2004 and was part of our celebration of our 20th anniversary!

Our next live performances will be on Saturday, December 22 at 8:00pm and Sunday, December 23 at 2:30pm at the Stage Door Players in Dunwoody. Mark your calendars for our annual presentation of Thomas E. Fuller's An Atlanta Christmas.

Duration: 17:47 Size: 8.3M

Link - Download

Podcast 61 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth part 3

This week we continue our five part presentation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, adapted for audio by Thomas E. Fuller and Gregory Nicholl. It features the voice of legendary writer Harlan Ellison, as well as anime voice actor Michael Brady.

This was performed live at Dragon*Con 2004 and was part of our celebration of our 20th anniversary!

This Saturday, October 27, ARTC will present The Rats in the Walls by H. P. Lovecraft at the Stage Door Players in Dunwoody. Come be a part of the recording of the source material for these podcasts!

Size: 8.7M Duration: 18:37

Link - Download

Podcast 60 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth part 2

This week we continue our five part presentation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, adapted for audio by Thomas E. Fuller and Gregory Nicholl. It features the voice of legendary writer Harlan Ellison, as well as anime voice actor Michael Brady.

This was performed live at Dragon*Con 2004 and was part of our celebration of our 20th anniversary!

Size: 8M Duration: 17:13

Link - Download

Podcast 59 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth part 1

This week we are pleased to begin a five part presentation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, adapted for audio by Thomas E. Fuller and Gregory Nicholl. It features the voice of legendary writer Harlan Ellison, as well as anime voice actor Michael Brady.

This was performed live at Dragon*Con 2004.

There is Adventure in Sound!

Link - Download

Size: 8M Duration: 16:54

58 - Solution Unsatisfactory part 3

This week we are pleased to continue our podcast of the Dragon*Con 2001 production of Robert A. Heinlein's Solution Unsatisfactory. Guest starring in this production are Peter David and Lisa Getto.

Size: 8.4M Duration: 17:51

Link - Download

57 - Solution Unsatisfactory part 2

This week we are pleased to continue our podcast of the Dragon*Con 2001 production of Robert A. Heinlein's Solution Unsatisfactory. Guest starring in this production are Peter David and Lisa Getto.

Size: 8.4M Duration: 17:53

Link - Download

56 - Solution Unsatisfactory part 1

Back in 2001 we performed an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Solution Unsatisfactory. As you might expect, we were very proud and excited to present a work by such a well-regarded author. And since it was written in 1941 we were already aware that Mr. Heinlein had seemingly seen the future of world events by predicting the use of atomic weapons, although in a different form.

Little did we realize how memorable this performance would become. Performed live on August 31, we planned studio time for September 12, 2001. Needless to say we moved this production up in the queue.

Guest starring in this production are Peter David and Lisa Getto.

Duration: 18:57 Size: 8.8M

Link - Download

Another photo from "Guards! Guards!"

John Rhys-Davies
Originally uploaded by dtaylor404

John Rhys-Davies and Daniel Taylor. Background: David Benedict, Jonathan Strickland, Brad Strickland. Yes, there were plenty of people in this play with larger roles than me, but I'm running this blog. So sue me. Photo by Ken Grimes.

55 - Guards! Guards! part three

Welcome to part three, the final chapter of our 2001 Dragon*Con performance of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, adapted for audio by David Benedict, featuring John Rhys-Davies as Lupine Wonse.

I hope everyone has been enjoying hearing this as much as I enjoyed adapting it. Being able to share it with a mass audience has brought back a lot of the enthusiasm I had when I was working on the project originally. I occasionally felt as though I were summoning dragons myself as I constructed them out of pure sound.

As part of this production, ARTC made a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the orangutan and its natural habitat.

Size: 12M Duration: 25:56

Link - Download

54 - Guards! Guards! part 2

Size: 11.5M Duration: 24:33

Welcome to part two of our 2001 Dragon*Con performance of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, adapted for audio by David Benedict, featuring John Rhys-Davies as Lupine Wonse.

As I mentioned last week, the adaptation for this production was particularly difficult. It is a full-length novel, rich with character development, humor, plots and subplots, and is considered by many to be a fine starting point for those wishing to get into the Discworld series. When compressing it down into an hour, most of that stuff had to go out the window. When we read the first draft it took over two hours and we didn't finish. That's when I knew I had my work cut out for me.

For those of you who have read the original book, I agonized over the scene with the prospective dragon hunters who were all complaining about how you don't get respect from monsters anymore and how one monster's mother actually came round to complain after he was killed and his head put up over the door. For those of you who haven't, don't think this adaptation even begins to cover the depth of this book. Read it.

As part of this production, ARTC made a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the orangutan and its natural habitat.

Link - Download

Guards! Guards!

John Rhys-Davies
Originally uploaded by dtaylor404

Here's a photo from the September 2001 DragonCon show. Left to right are Thomas E. Fuller, David Benedict, John Rhys-Davies, and Jonathan Strickland. That Rhys-Davies guy seemed pretty talented: I predict he'll go far. Photo by Ken Grimes.

53 - Guards! Guards! part 1

Wow. It's hard to believe we've been podcasting now for one full year. Fifty two podcasts have come and gone and now we're starting on year two, and we're starting it with a really special one.

Back in 2001 we received permission to perform Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett at Dragon*Con. Furthermore, we were very privileged to have John Rhys-Davies play the role of Lupine Wonse When the performance was over we thought that was it...a copy of the recording was sent to Mr. Pratchett, but other than that we thought it would remain locked in the vast, cavernous ARTC archive vault.

But then we started podcasting. And so I wrote to Mr. Pratchett and asked permission to distribute the recording and happily he agreed.

What you are about to hear, in three parts, is something I will always be proud of. I worked very hard on the adaptation, and believe me, cutting a novel-length book down to an hour is hard work, especially when you have an attachment to the material like I did.

I'd like to thank Mr. Terry Pratchett for permission to do the adaptation, performance, and the podcast. I'd also like to thank the late Thomas E. Fuller for his assistance with the adaptation. And I'd like to thank all of you for helping us reach one full year of podcasting, with hopefully many more to come.

David Benedict