Singer and pianist Marcia Ball has consistently served up her infectious New Orleans/Gulf Coast/Texas brew over her near 40 years of playing music professionally. She has been an Austin and national favorite for decades, frequently earning Blues Music Awards and Grammy nominations for her albums. She has an in-store show scheduled at Waterloo Records (where she previously recorded a live album) on Wednesday the 30th. Listen to Marcia Ball in Studio 1a.

It’s nothing but O’Dark Hall-of-Famers on today’s podcast, so you’re gonna love it. You’re gonna love it so much you leave it on your iPod forever, and burn copies of it on cd to mail to your friends. That’s the current technology, right?

Batting leadoff today is Nate DiMeo with his show The Memory Palace, and the “Giants in Those Days” episode.

In the two spot, it’s our Brooklyn buddy Eric Winnick with Beyond the Rope: A Captivity’s Aftermath.

And in the three hole, we’ve got heavy hitter Rob Roshenthal and his show HowSound. Rob always gets the dirt on radio productions, and we’ve got the “My Kingdom For Some Structure” episode of that show.

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with the Honorable Shirley Clarke Franklin. The former two-term Mayor of Atlanta joined the LBJ Schoo…

The Cruel Circus is the newest play from Trouble Puppet Theater Company. It’s a darkly whimsical work set in the world of a collection of strange circus performers, who are embodied onstage entirely by original puppets. Trouble Puppet never has a shortage of unique and interesting puppets in their works, but this show let them create characters that are interesting and different even by their standards. The misfit circus performers that make up the cast aren’t traditionally human-shaped creatures; there’s a guy with a unicycle for legs, a living cannonball, and a few animals (among others). Most characters are performed by three puppeteers at once, so the performers have to work together very closely, in both the mental and physical sense.

The Cruel Circus is written by Trouble Puppet artistic director Connor Hopkins and features original music by Justin Sherburn.

After selling out the cafetorium for last year’s musical (The Wizard of Oz), the kids of Rawson Saunders School for children with dyslexia are moving to a larger venue this year – the Stateside at the Paramount. They’ll be staging the musical Peter Pan, with not just a student cast, but also a student crew. It’s the first time the Stateside has partnered with a school; the young actors will get a chance to perform on a real-deal stage while the student tech crew will get to work with the professional staff of the Stateside.

Peter Pan stars Surya Garcia-Crow in the title role, Ruth Black as Captain Hook, and Emmett Griffin-Baldwin as Hook’s right hand man, Smee. All the ensemble parts (pirates, lost boys, etc) are played by younger students at the school, and the show is directed by Rawson Saunders drama teacher Emily Beatty.

Hey, it’s the weekend, almost! Time to get your relaxation on with a little podcast action. So pour yourself a nice cool glass of lemonade, settle into your hammock, and blast this ‘cast into your earholes.

We’ll start off with a little “theater of the mind” from Joseph Dougherty and the fine folks at Handwritten Theatre. And if that’s not enough for you, we’ll bring you a new edition of KUT’s own Views & Brews Remix from O’Dark alum Rebecca McInroy. It’s a very compelling look at the changing face of celebrity through the work of photographer Arnold Newman. Good stuff.

You know, around here at the O’Dark office complex, we get lots of phone calls and postcards with the same question: “Can you please, please, air the show twice in a row on Sundays, and then again at least once every night of the week?” Well, in a word, no. We asked our program director if we could dedicate 24 hours or more of airtime to O’Dark every week, and he was strangely reluctant. So we make do with the next best thing, which is to put the show up on the interwebs so you can listen to it as often as possible on your own schedule.

This is the ground-breaking episode 180, featuring Clever Apes, Jay Allison’s Stories of Transformation, The Mikie Show, 99% Invisible, and much more! Enjoy it!