The Quiet Part Out Loud

Brooks Ashmanskas is one of Broadway's greats - known for being reliably hilarious in whatever he does - but he started out as a tap dancer and a singer before honing his mastery over humor. He shares the gift and the burden of being as funny as he is, and how humor has helped him to succeed while not taking himself too seriously in the process.

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Telly Leung is a Broadway veteran (Rent, Aladdin, Phantom) who embraced the culture of alcohol in the theater from his earliest days doing Rent in his twenties. Two decades later, he and Bobby share their trajectories navigating the individual and social factors that make drinking so central to so many aspects of the Broadway lifestyle, and what has changed since taking stock of drinking's benefits - and its costs.

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Tom Kirdahy is a successful Broadway producer with several shows running in New York concurrently. He brings his extraordinary experiences as an activist and leader during the AIDS crisis, as well as his many years as loving husband to playwright Terrence McNally to the work he does today. It is through enormous loss that he moves forward with grief, but also with gratitude and passion.

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Emily Walton was born into a family of theater people and never questioned her destiny as she began performing professionally as a teenager. She discusses the unique paradox of receiving all the benefits of joining the family business along with the surprising limits to self-investigation when so much of the future seemed to be predetermined.

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Carla Duren and Bobby played opposite each other in the Broadway revival of 110 in the Shade. Twenty years later, they are both working with artists in healing professions, while Carla's wisdom grows out of a lifelong search for spiritual meaning that begin with organized religion, and emerges today as a deeply personal relationship to the mystery of life.

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Patrick Stafford is an actor who has been navigating a serious kidney disease for most of his life. This month, he underwent a second life-saving kidney transplant. He discusses how an early relationship to his mortality affected his life and his creativity, and what it is like to live in a world where most people are in denial about the fragility of life that he has become intimate with.

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Adam Gwon is a composer and lyricist whose work explores the tension in the human condition between solitude and connection. It is his own introversion that fostered the space for him to discover his authentic voice, while it is also a tool for connection that shares the meaning of his most deeply held experiences.

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Michele Pawk is a Broadway star who is disarmingly down-to-earth and as generous as she is talented. She opens up about a long a varied career on Broadway, and how her inner critic has evolved from paralyzing during particularly difficult transitions to a trusted ally in her quest to remain open and authentic in her work and life.

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Host Bobby Steggert takes another step back from interviewing to reflect on the phenomenon of polarization - from the current political climate, to the contradictory forces in every human experience.

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Jenni Barber (Beetlejuice) comes from a family lineage of caretaking, and it is infused in every role she plays, from cast member, to teacher and mentor, to wife and mother. Jenni explores the profound connectivity, as well as the risk to a loss of self in the role of caretaker, and how she is learning to balance it with age and wisdom.

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