Posted by chicagomedia.org on April 16, 2009 at 09:50:00:
'This American Life' goes live -- to fill a budget hole
You can see how much fun a radio show can be
Steve Johnson | Tribune Internet critic
April 16, 2009
Ira Glass is coming back to Chicago, but just for the weekend. His public radio hit, "This American Life," founded at and still produced by Chicago Public Radio, is putting on one of its occasional live shows at the Chicago Theatre Sunday, part of the program's mission to get "funner" this year, Glass says, in part as a counterbalance to the tremendous success of its programs explaining the economy.
Joss Whedon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") will sing in public for the first time. Starlee Kine will tell a story with Post-it Notes, and Dan Savage and Mike Birbiglia will offer stories too.
That event is long sold out, but, in an innovation, the entire show will be restaged in New York April 23 and broadcast to scores of movie theaters, including 27 in Illinois. Because of high ticket demand— Evanston is already sold out; other suburban locales still have tickets -- there'll be an encore cinema showing May 7. (Thislife.org has details.)
We caught up with Glass by telephone during a week he was preparing for the live show and also finishing a TV episode for Showtime.
Q You are a notorious perfectionist when it comes to shaping radio pieces. How do you let that all go so that a stage version of the show can unfold?
A Basically the secret is I don't let it go at all, and my senior producer Julie Snyder and I have been obsessively editing and re-editing every story of the show and, in fact, like, last night at 10 o'clock after getting home from Easter dinner at a neighbor's house, I remixed the opening story of the show, swapping in different music. There'll always be little ad-libbed moments, but we find it's best if the show's pretty tight. You know, it's just as compulsive as the regular show.
Q It doesn't play that way on the air.
A That's great. That is the goal. A lot of broadcasting, I think, is doing a tremendous amount of preparation and trying to act like, "Oh, this thought is just occurring to me right now."
Q How many of these have you done now, and what have they taught you?
A We've done them every two or three years since the show began in 1995. Usually there's a gap of two years at least, just because they're such a production to mount. What have we learned? A thing I've discovered is that for the first few minutes of the show people are so stunned to see how we all look, and especially to see me actually perform my part and be a person who you can see versus somebody who you're hearing, I think that carries us for a good couple of minutes -- just the sheer, "What the hell?"
Q With these things becoming a regular part of the schedule, should Garrison Keillor be nervous?
A [Laughs.] No, sadly. I wish he needed to be nervous. I wish I was good enough at hosting the show live that he needed to be nervous. But I feel like I'm on the 15-yard line and he's all the way at the other end of the field. He's such a huge presence in the show in a way that is bigger than the presence I am in any of our shows. It's his personality which really carries the show. And he's almost never working off of a script except for when they're doing the radio dramas. I assume that he's somebody who likes getting up on the stage, whereas the performing part, I'm fine with that, but it's not my favorite part of my job. I prefer the writing and editing part of it. In that way, I'm more of a civilian.
Q Are you Ed Sullivan? Who's your analog in that role?
A I mean I guess it's some combination in those shows. I am a little bit of Ed Sullivan 'cause part of what I'm doing is saying "Omigod, I got some really wonderful stuff for you people. And, uh, coming up next you know straight from the West Coast, a hot new writer."
Q And he juggles!
A And he juggles, exactly. But then there is also part of the job where I'm writing things myself that I need to write and perform that's closer, I guess, to what Garrison does.
Q The idea for the movie-screen presentation, where did that come from?
A I don't know if this is a good thing to include ... but it's the truth. We have a $120,000 hole in our budget for the year, and I was just, like, what could we possibly do. And I was like, "All right, let's do one of them live shows." [Laughs.] "And try to make our $120,000 so we can all stay employed for the full year. [It'll be] in hundreds of movie theaters all across the country in front of an audience that seems like it's going to be 30 or 40,000 people.