Melinda Peterson as Agatha Christie
2015 HEAR Now Festival Featured Programming
Audio Mysteries:
Agatha Christie's BBC Murders
from Otherworld Media
Saturday, June 13th, 3:30pm-5:00pm, Cinemark Palace Theater
Purchase an ALL ACCESS FESTIVAL PASS, to attend any of our events, or select individual tickets to specific events you want to attend:
Individual Event Ticket Costs:
$8.00 per 90 minute "listening event" in Cinemark Theaters
$30.00 per 5 sessions (FIVE 90 minute "listening events" in Cinemark Theaters)
$15.00 for Thursday Night Opening event - Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil
$15.00 for Saturday Afternoon Reading With Your Ears: The Art of the Audiobook
(This program is free with a Kansas City library RSVP.)
$15.00 for Saturday Night AUDIO Tonight!
$15.00 for Closing Brunch and Awards Ceremony
The following programs are free and require no tickets: Never Again War: The Sacrifice of Kathe Kollwitz and Celebrating Mark Twain.
Audio Mysteries:
Agatha Christie's BBC Murders
from Otherworld Media
Saturday, June 13th, 3:30pm-5:00pm, Cinemark Palace Theater
Purchase an ALL ACCESS FESTIVAL PASS, to attend any of our events, or select individual tickets to specific events you want to attend:
Individual Event Ticket Costs:
$8.00 per 90 minute "listening event" in Cinemark Theaters
$30.00 per 5 sessions (FIVE 90 minute "listening events" in Cinemark Theaters)
$15.00 for Thursday Night Opening event - Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil
$15.00 for Saturday Afternoon Reading With Your Ears: The Art of the Audiobook
(This program is free with a Kansas City library RSVP.)
$15.00 for Saturday Night AUDIO Tonight!
$15.00 for Closing Brunch and Awards Ceremony
The following programs are free and require no tickets: Never Again War: The Sacrifice of Kathe Kollwitz and Celebrating Mark Twain.
Meet the Otherworld team of David Ossman and Judith Walcutt
as they present Agatha Christie's BBC Murders.
They have created a theatrical entertainment which blends the techniques of screen acting, voice-over, sound design, and live theatre into a 21st Century performance medium.
David Ossman
|
Judith Walcutt
|
Originally adapted for live radio performance for the International Mystery Writer’s Festival and broadcast by WNIN in 2009, the show was subsequently (Summer, 2010) produced for surround sound technology, while using screen projection, fashion, and portable stage craft to create a touring show for black box theatres.
The original cast featured Melinda Peterson, Phil Proctor, Gary Sandy, and Amy Walker.
Amy Walker as Lola Valdez
|
Phil Proctor, Cassaundra Post, and Orson Ossman
|
Preston Ossman and Tony Brewer at SFX Table
DAVID OSSMAN'S radio career stretches from the infancy of FM in the late 1950’s through free-form radio in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ‘70s to a fifty-year career in writing and production for audio media, stage and film. A pioneer public broadcaster in New York and Los Angeles, Ossman chronicled the poetry scene with a radio series, “The Sullen Art,” later a book (Corinth 1963) and dozens of literature, music and drama programs, including biographical portraits of Bertold Brecht, e. e. cummings and Jean Cocteau.
With The Firesign Theatre, he created a string of improvised live comedy broadcasts in Los Angeles (1969-1972), satiric pieces for NPR’s news programs, including “Campaign Chronicle” (1980) and “All Things Firesign” (2002-3). He produced “Fools in Space” for XM Satellite Radio which won the Gold Medal for Comedy programs at the New York Festivals in 2002.
Ossman’s forty-year collaboration with the Firesign Theatre, a quartet of comic writer/performers for radio, audio, stage and film, has resulted in a unique catalogue of more than 20 albums on LP and CD. Firesign’s innovative use of recording technology inspired a generation of audio producers and has garnered three Grammy nominations.
In the early 1980’s, Ossman created and hosted the Peabody-Award winning series, “The Sunday Show,” a five-hour arts magazine for National Public Radio. He went to WGBH, Boston in 1985, to teach radio skills to science journalists in the Macy Science Fellowship, while also working on the final season of The Spider’s Web, the NEH-funded radio theatre series of American classics.
He stayed on at WGBH to produce an NEA-funded series of major plays in collaboration with the American Repertory Theatre, including “Orchids in the Moonlight” by Carlos Fuentes and “Jaques and His Master” by Milan Kundera. He became host of “Radio Movies,” a long-form radio theatre program piloted for national release with his then co-producer and future wife, Judith Walcutt.
With The Firesign Theatre, he created a string of improvised live comedy broadcasts in Los Angeles (1969-1972), satiric pieces for NPR’s news programs, including “Campaign Chronicle” (1980) and “All Things Firesign” (2002-3). He produced “Fools in Space” for XM Satellite Radio which won the Gold Medal for Comedy programs at the New York Festivals in 2002.
Ossman’s forty-year collaboration with the Firesign Theatre, a quartet of comic writer/performers for radio, audio, stage and film, has resulted in a unique catalogue of more than 20 albums on LP and CD. Firesign’s innovative use of recording technology inspired a generation of audio producers and has garnered three Grammy nominations.
In the early 1980’s, Ossman created and hosted the Peabody-Award winning series, “The Sunday Show,” a five-hour arts magazine for National Public Radio. He went to WGBH, Boston in 1985, to teach radio skills to science journalists in the Macy Science Fellowship, while also working on the final season of The Spider’s Web, the NEH-funded radio theatre series of American classics.
He stayed on at WGBH to produce an NEA-funded series of major plays in collaboration with the American Repertory Theatre, including “Orchids in the Moonlight” by Carlos Fuentes and “Jaques and His Master” by Milan Kundera. He became host of “Radio Movies,” a long-form radio theatre program piloted for national release with his then co-producer and future wife, Judith Walcutt.
JUDITH WALCUTT is the founder and CEO of Otherworld Media, an internationally acclaimed production company since 1981. She has been a professional in the broadcast and communications field for over thirty years. As a writer, director, and producer, she has generated hundreds of hours of programming for radio, theatre, television, and live festivals. She began her career in theatre with an off-Broadway production of her first play at the La MaMa etc. shortly after her graduation from Bard College in 1974. She continued working in mixed media in Los Angeles, collaborating with performance artists, musicians, and dancers at the Woman’s Building, California Institute of the Arts, and at the University of Southern California where she finished her Masters degree in Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature in 1976. In 1979, she moved to Seattle and produced her first radio play for young people at KRAB-FM, the first free-form radio station in the Northwest.
In 1985, Walcutt took her producing skills to WGBH, Boston, for “The Spider’s Web,” hosted by Julie Harris and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The weekly radio drama series for young people aired classics of American literature, and was the last of its kind for public radio. Her first large-scale production for The Web, “The Red Badge of Courage,” a collaboration with her future husband, David Ossman, became the pilot for WGBH’s “Radio Movies” in 1986 in which the team applied the techniques of on-location recording, as well as filmic sound design and musical scoring to “radio drama,” moving the art form out of its past and into its future.
After returning to the Northwest in 1988, to have a family and resume management of Otherworld Media, Walcutt acted as Executive Producer and Line Producer of Otherworld’s ground-breaking, all-digital production of “The War of the Worlds” (a Grammy-nominee in 1988) and the historic reimagining of “Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths” (1991) which honored the 200th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Both were broadcast by thousands of stations worldwide. “Truths” received multiple Gold and Silver Awards at the New York Festivals and a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Other award-winning programs of the period included “The Door in the Wall” starring Colleen Dewhurst and a co-production with WETA, the 1992 epic, “Empire of the Air,” which authentically recreated the sounds, voices and programs of the first 50 years of U. S. broadcasting and was celebrated by the New York International Radio Festivals with another Gold Medal.
In 2000, Walcutt produced the only complete audio adaptation of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” in an all-star production celebrating the book’s centennial and introduced by Ray Bradbury. It won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal Award.
Other production honors include an Armstrong Award for Creative use of the Medium, a Golden Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and both Gold and Silver Awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Judith has been a guest-speaker at the School of Sound Colloquium in London, U.K. the recipient of a Hedgebrook Writer’s Residency and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Mystery Writer’s Festival.
As line-producer-director of the Live Radio Theatre productions for the 2007 and 2008 International Mystery Writers Festivals in Owensboro, Kentucky, she staged original plays based on stories by Ray Bradbury and Mary Higgins Clark, Rupert Holmes’ “Remember WENN” television series, Stuart Kaminsky, Sam Bobrick, and several adaptations for stage of full-length plays and motion pictures.
In 2009, Judith produced and co-adapted with her husband David Ossman an entirely new production of four virtually unknown BBC radio mysteries by Agatha Christie, written for the BBC between 1936 and 1954. The final performance in Owensboro were broadcast live as part of the series, “Discovering New Mysteries,” hosted by Angela Lansbury, produced by Otherworld Media. Her long-time search for a theatrical expression of the audio medium led her to use stage techniques from Broadway and sound-design from Hollywood, along with glamorous costuming and original “period” music to take Christie’s melodramas into the realm of Hitchcock’s thrillers.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
Walcutt has always enjoyed pushing the envelope of applications of new technology. The 1988 production of “The War of the Worlds” was the first all digital broadcast of a radio play from field to transmission, with beta-tested, portable and multi-track digital recorders provided by Sony and digital transmission by WGBH, Boston.
In the early 90’s, she created a prototype specialized “narrowcast” audio program content service of six different channels of spoken word materials, “Otherworld Air,” which tested the concept of specialized content provided via alternative technologies.
In the early 2000’s, Walcutt experimented with state-of-the-art, portable broadcast equipment to bring live music festivals to both local broadcasters, internet listeners, and national audiences, producing the first Border to Border Community Radio Broadcast of the Northwest Folklife Festival. During that time, she was also a founder of a low power radio station on Whidbey Island, where she lives.
Currently, she is working with cutting-edge, surround-sound technology to create a unique, audio-driven theatrical experience, blending techniques of voice work, screen acting, sound design, and 21st Century stagecraft.
In 1985, Walcutt took her producing skills to WGBH, Boston, for “The Spider’s Web,” hosted by Julie Harris and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The weekly radio drama series for young people aired classics of American literature, and was the last of its kind for public radio. Her first large-scale production for The Web, “The Red Badge of Courage,” a collaboration with her future husband, David Ossman, became the pilot for WGBH’s “Radio Movies” in 1986 in which the team applied the techniques of on-location recording, as well as filmic sound design and musical scoring to “radio drama,” moving the art form out of its past and into its future.
After returning to the Northwest in 1988, to have a family and resume management of Otherworld Media, Walcutt acted as Executive Producer and Line Producer of Otherworld’s ground-breaking, all-digital production of “The War of the Worlds” (a Grammy-nominee in 1988) and the historic reimagining of “Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths” (1991) which honored the 200th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Both were broadcast by thousands of stations worldwide. “Truths” received multiple Gold and Silver Awards at the New York Festivals and a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Other award-winning programs of the period included “The Door in the Wall” starring Colleen Dewhurst and a co-production with WETA, the 1992 epic, “Empire of the Air,” which authentically recreated the sounds, voices and programs of the first 50 years of U. S. broadcasting and was celebrated by the New York International Radio Festivals with another Gold Medal.
In 2000, Walcutt produced the only complete audio adaptation of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” in an all-star production celebrating the book’s centennial and introduced by Ray Bradbury. It won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal Award.
Other production honors include an Armstrong Award for Creative use of the Medium, a Golden Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and both Gold and Silver Awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Judith has been a guest-speaker at the School of Sound Colloquium in London, U.K. the recipient of a Hedgebrook Writer’s Residency and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Mystery Writer’s Festival.
As line-producer-director of the Live Radio Theatre productions for the 2007 and 2008 International Mystery Writers Festivals in Owensboro, Kentucky, she staged original plays based on stories by Ray Bradbury and Mary Higgins Clark, Rupert Holmes’ “Remember WENN” television series, Stuart Kaminsky, Sam Bobrick, and several adaptations for stage of full-length plays and motion pictures.
In 2009, Judith produced and co-adapted with her husband David Ossman an entirely new production of four virtually unknown BBC radio mysteries by Agatha Christie, written for the BBC between 1936 and 1954. The final performance in Owensboro were broadcast live as part of the series, “Discovering New Mysteries,” hosted by Angela Lansbury, produced by Otherworld Media. Her long-time search for a theatrical expression of the audio medium led her to use stage techniques from Broadway and sound-design from Hollywood, along with glamorous costuming and original “period” music to take Christie’s melodramas into the realm of Hitchcock’s thrillers.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
Walcutt has always enjoyed pushing the envelope of applications of new technology. The 1988 production of “The War of the Worlds” was the first all digital broadcast of a radio play from field to transmission, with beta-tested, portable and multi-track digital recorders provided by Sony and digital transmission by WGBH, Boston.
In the early 90’s, she created a prototype specialized “narrowcast” audio program content service of six different channels of spoken word materials, “Otherworld Air,” which tested the concept of specialized content provided via alternative technologies.
In the early 2000’s, Walcutt experimented with state-of-the-art, portable broadcast equipment to bring live music festivals to both local broadcasters, internet listeners, and national audiences, producing the first Border to Border Community Radio Broadcast of the Northwest Folklife Festival. During that time, she was also a founder of a low power radio station on Whidbey Island, where she lives.
Currently, she is working with cutting-edge, surround-sound technology to create a unique, audio-driven theatrical experience, blending techniques of voice work, screen acting, sound design, and 21st Century stagecraft.
