Podcast Palooza 2021

Gold Selections

Vote for your favorite Podcast Palooza submission:

Some Selections May Contain Strong Language

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All Aboard! - The Smoking Car

Fireside Mystery Theatre

Join us for a cross-country locomotive journey as romantic as you can imagine — with just a touch of the diabolical in every car. Our final destination in this All Aboard! series is a chilling tale of secrets, negotiations, and hidden truths. In the lush smoking lounge, we find a cloaked figure who whispers, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” The answer will be revealed … once the smoke clears.

Mystery Thriller

All Night Radio

Fireside Mystery Theatre

Rex Arnold, a troubled former star from the Golden Age of radio is haunted by his own life and the world of an old radio drama series that he broadcasts while working the graveyard shift of a remote station.

Mystery Thriller

All of Us Demons

Gabe Templin

Just Press Playhouse has been creating Audio Drama since 2016 beginning with Flushed With Love. In 2017 Just Press Playhouse returned with their first serial Time Trip! which was selected as a participant of the NATF Playhouse at the 2018 HearNow Festival and Episode 10 was listed as one of the “Top 100 Episodes of 2018”. Their stand alone series Just Press Playhouse Presents has produced other well received episodes such as “Fool’s Gold” and “Lights On in Puerto Rico”.

Drama

At the Tone: The Love Story of Hardback, The Reading Horse

Josh Denty

Reporters Dick, Madison, Eugene, Harry, Frank, Amanda and their intern Gus present real news from the fake town of Skruntville, Nebraska. After a state senator is sent to live far away on a big capitol hill, trainer Sam Whitney and Hardback, the Reading Horse step in to try and tell us his final wishes. Babe Ruth dangles a visit over everyone’s heads, Dick learns about genetic engineering and Frank gives a high stakes report from the hospital. Don’t forget to stick around for Hardback’s book club.

Comedy

Barjory Buffet: The Cruise Detective

Brad Beideman

Cruises are the murder capital of the sea and the sea is the murder capital of the world. One human has jurisdiction over international waters and she’s here to tame the seas and water the skis. In this week’s mystery, Dunk or Drown, a man goes down a water slide and never comes out the other end! What!!

Comedy

Beer Run

Thomas Zipperer

Trapped in quarantine due to a pandemic, Bob and Zipp invent a teleporter to break into the local liquor store for some refreshments. However, the machine malfunctions and brings in other travelers, including a wizard, a solider from the future, and more!

Comedy

Bloody Bay

Andrew Pond

With murders becoming less and less frequent, the tourism industry in Bloody Bay, along with its population, is diminishing. But the small New England town may have just had its 100th murder! Bestselling mystery author Florence Gardener, desperate to keep hopes of a new novel alive, takes it upon herself to help the case move forward by attempting to seduce the recently widowed Dennis Spencer. When the case is quickly closed, Florence is unable to let her dream die and so she plans a murder of her own.

Comedy

Christmas Day in the Morning

Storyteller Productions

Originally published in 1955, Pearl S. Buck – winner of the Pulitzer & Nobel prizes – captures the spirit of Christmas with this elegant and heartwarming story about a boy’s gift & the true meaning of love. Original music by Bruce Carver.

Drama

Curse of Civilization

Ted Robinson

Curse of Civilization is a time-travel adventure audio drama that harkens back to the golden age of serialized radio plays with a modern approach to sound design and storytelling. The series immerses the listener into an exciting, rich world full of comedy, suspense and action. Over six episodes, our heroes explore strange lands and face ancient evil to solve the mystery of the Lost Civilization of Zapotilia.

Science Fiction

Destroy All Humans

Venus Radio Theater On the Air

Rebethany Omega is a reptilian princess posing as a human woman sent to our planet to discover our weaknesses so her kind can more easily destroy us, but when she is having too much fun being an earth woman, her father, Emperor Lord Sklurch threatens to send her to the mush dimension if she doesn’t find the secret to humanity.

Comedy Sci-Fi

I Still Think About You

Brian Hutchison

Adam McClure, successful New York actor, is trying to make sense of an incident from his past that still haunts him. He’s seeing a therapist; We revisit Adam’s past, arriving with open enthusiasm in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, taking odd jobs in a restaurant and law firm while building his acting resume. His mysterious memoir details people he encounters— people who will come back into his life— colorful, eccentric urbanites. Caroline; southern belle & party girl who disappears under mysterious circumstances; Dylan Lodge, an enigmatic actor who mentors Adam. A decade later, Adam learns details about Caroline, and Dylan and Adam have an unexpected, strange reunion. What appears as an odd coincidence( or was it?) soon becomes a matter of obsession that makes Adam fear for his life, and question the relationship with his new partner, Tom. As he digs deeper into the mystery of Dylan Lodge, Adam learns unsettling details that alter the course of his life. “There’s nothing for it, you know? You have to play it as it lays…you just have to keep moving forward…”

Mystery Thriller

I Want To Be Good

Millie Wood-Downie

I Want To Be Good is a spoken word audio piece inspired by an ‘All About Me’ book completed

drama autobiographical

I'll Never Be Alone Anymore - The Story Of The Skala Eressos Lesbian Community

Anais Dupuis

The lesbian community of Skala Eressos is situated in a remote village in Lesbos, Greece. Created in the 70s by a handful of women fueled with a desire of freedom, the community have welcomed thousands of women, before declining in the 2000s. Nowadays, the community is formed by older lesbians. But they are not your typical 60 year old women. They party, they have sex and they speak their minds. What they say about themselves is not only a precious testimony of a vanishing community that once changed so many women’s lives, but also a bridge to understand lesbian culture.

Creative Non-Fiction

Illegal Helpers

Katrin Redfern

Illegal Helpers explores the current refugee crisis in Europe through the eyes of ordinary citizens. The play is based on verbatim interviews which the playwright, Maxi Obexer, conducted with Swiss, Austrian, and German residents from all walks of life—doctors, judges, social workers, activists, and students—who took it upon themselves to help refugees seeking a new life in Europe. In this documentary work, we hear the voices of those expressing their objections to national laws they find xenophobic and unjust. The play opens with the words of Michael Genner, a well-known Austrian activist who represents asylum seekers.

Creative Non-Fiction

In Plastic

Attilio Rigotti

Produced remotely during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, In Plastic is an episodic experimental audio experience that explores the future of our relationship with plastic: a world where our most elementally human feeling, love, is dimmed, distorted, and altered by a plastiphillic planet.

Science Fiction

LaDonna's Epiphany

Vera Brooks

LaDonna Smith returns to her hometown of Chicago from her high profile political job in D.C. to take her parents for their vaccine shots, which results in her getting a dose of humility and restored humanity. ( Episode 1 of the 8 part anthology podcast, “Vaccine Vignettes”)

Drama

Letters From Strangers

Russ McGee

How much are you willing to give to a stranger? Cathy receives letters from strangers regularly, people she has never met but she feels like she knows intimately. Each letter reveals how her husband’s generosity has affected them individually; giving them each a second chance.

Drama

Lover's Red

Bill Pearce

A coming-of-age story of two young women becoming aware of their sexuality in mid-20th Century in the Midwest. Peggy and Helen come face to face with each other and who they really are. Unfortunately, Peggy’s father threatens the relationship.

Drama

Mandible Judy

Chris Burke

Not your typical bi-weekly horror, scifi, telepathic-frogs audio drama, Mandible Judy also features a synth-wielding geneticist and strangely sonorous rocks from space. Our cast are veterans of theater, film and audio fiction and the series includes rich, evocative sound design and a dark, original score of brooding synthesizers and surreal soundscapes.

Horror

Master Builder

Tamara Kissane

Running a total of 94 minutes and divided in two acts, MASTER BUILDER tells the story of the rise and fall of Helen ‘Sully’ Sullivan, an intensely passionate and ambitious architect who designs outrageous homes for the very rich. MASTER BUILDER was inspired by Henrick Ibsen’s classic stage play, The Master Builder published in 1892. MASTER BUILDER is a two-part audio drama for adults. It contains salty language, allusions to childhood trauma, sexual situations, and quirkiness suitable for grown-up ears.

Dark Comedy

Mission: Rejected

Michael DeAngelis

The story of the world’s most secret agents…the backups. For the first time in his career, Special Agent Chet Phillips has discovered that he can choose NOT to accept a mission! That means there’s no choice but to send in the “B Team”: A nervous pencil pusher promoted to the field, a computer hacker working off her sentence, a fading former sitcom star and a recently reassigned White House intern. A full cast comedy audio adventure with a new episode debuting each month!

Comedy

Muckey Landing - Episode 5, The Shoplifting

Chris Polo

Tiny Muckey Landing, Delaware (motto: “So close to where you’d rather be”) is the locale for this fiction comedy podcast. In this episode, general store owner Virgil Slatter and his brainless business partner, Harmon Truesdale, discover that six cans of ScrappyTime Scrapple Whip have gone missing from the shelves, so Harmon enlists the aid of rookie firefighter Buck Firken to catch the thieves. Throw in naive youth minister Sammy Fraudiddler, caustic uber-receptionist Doral Bernstein, a menacing invitation from Harmon’s jail buddy Psycho Bob, and a visit from Amish weed farmer Luke Yoder and his uncle, Uncle Yoder, and mayhem ensues!

Comedy

Muffy Drake

Jim Hall

Muffy Drake is a Franco-American team of storytellers based out of Paris. The podcast introduces a kaleidoscope of characters facing the absurdity of the human condition in each episode. Imagine: Dorothy Parker and Salvador Dali walk into a bar, Edvard Munch is bartending..

Comedy

Never Bet the Devil Your Head, Part 2

Poe Theatre On the Air

An audio drama adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” this production from the anthology series “Poe Theatre on the Air” is a the second in a two-part reimagining of the story as a conversation between an asylum inmate and the doctor supervising the facility. The catalog of Poe Theatre on the Air works are being archived by the Library of Congress for their importance to the historical and culture record of the United States.

Comedy Adaptation

Night Crew

Peter Hayward

Samantha Sharp is an up-and-coming space officer. After she requests a transfer to the S.S. Freedom to explore deep space under her hero, Captain Mansfield, she learns he works the night shift. Adventure, excitement, explosions – that’s all the purview of the day crew. At night, they do the dishes.

Comedy Science Fiction

No Better Lot

Christian Gridelli

No Better Lot is a 6 part surreal, noir tale of an ex-private eye, known only as “Guy,” sent to find out how people are escaping a small, rural outpost of Hell, or risk abandonment in the venomous landscape. Guy digs for answers, but how dirty is he going to have to get? And how much of that will wash off before he’s buried?

Mystery Thriller

No Ordinary Joe, No Ordinary Kennedy

Kate Valentine

“No Ordinary Joe, No Ordinary Kennedy tells the dramatic and tragic story of Joe Kennedy Jnr, the elder brother of JFK, who as a young man seemed destined to become President of the United States – until, that is, the Second World War intervened. The audio play examines Joe’s complex character, and traces events that led Joe to volunteering for a top-secret and highly dangerous mission, in which he was required to fly a Liberator plane packed with explosives and bail out before it crossed the Channel.”

Historical

One Fewer Night In Baghdad

Sarah Montague

Pedro M. Víllora’s dreamlike play deconstructs the world of history’s most famous storyteller, Scheherazade. The threat of death hangs over her as she explains to the Caliph whom she has entranced for ten thousand nights that she has run out of tales, and the reason is the most extraordinary tale of all: in an existential twist, Baghdad and all who dwell in her have disappeared. The play contains only two characters, but is ‘scored’ by stories from the Arabian Nights, which we hear under the surface of the dialogue.

Drama

One For the Road

Sean Bridges

During a fierce Maine blizzard, two old friends are ready to call it a night. When a frozen tourist bursts in the bar, desperate for help. His car is stuck in a snow drift a few miles back. With his wife and young daughter trapped inside.The two Mainers agree to assist. But they’re scared of what they might find out there in the dark. And the long drive to the stranded car. Abandoned in ‘Salem’s Lot. Audible Parade presents. A Dollar Baby production. Based on the short story by Stephen King.

Suspense Horror

Orange You Glad It's Over?

BS de Resistance

In our Series Finale, Joe and Kamala enjoy their post-inauguration afterglow. Lyssa has some heady new responsibilities. Trump finds retirement hard to swallow, and everything goes to Hell. The Texan Russians have exciting news. And Trump is trapped in a not-so-wonderful life.

Comedy

Priced to Sell

Katrina Salicrup

Eager to write their chapter of the American Dream, Emily and Justin Calloway purchase a “charming” fixer-upper in the suburbs of Portland, OR. They begin renovating and reproducing, in earnest, soon thereafter. But the couple’s bliss is short lived when Michael, the former Property Manager, begins sending Emily cryptic warnings about the basement… Meanwhile, Emily’s pregnancy takes a strange turn forcing her to stay home and rest. Drawn by unknown forces Emily spends more and more time working on a series of unsettling abstract paintings in her newly renovated basement studio. Little does she know; danger lies just below.

Horror

Remainder

Matthew Rini

Remainder is an audio drama thriller set in a world rebuilding after annihilation. Dr. Daniel MacNaughten and his team must find and retrieve a mysterious weapon from before the Day of Ash, while the prisoner Cora Ducarmont desperately searches for a way to escape the Unbroken Horde. Their paths are about to collide in a way that may determine the balance of power once and for all…

Science Fiction

Sleeping Beauty

David Farquhar

Sleeping Beauty magically comes to life in this adaptation of the timeless classic featuring multi-awarding winning New York voice talent Barbara Rosenblat and ATC Seneca Award Nominee Georgia Lee Schultz as Aurora. On the birth of Princess Aurora, an evil fairy places a curse on her and declares that before the sun sets on her 16th birthday, she will die by pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. To protect her from the evil spell, the King agrees to place Aurora in the care of three spirited good fairies who live in a cottage in the woods. One of the fairies conjures a spell so Aurora will fall into a deep sleep instead, to be awakened only by a kiss from her true love.

Children/Family

Smothered

R. Lawson Cade

“Smothered,” is a dramatic piece of fiction with themes such as: second chances, choosing the lesser of two evils, self-scrutiny, and going against the grain for something you believe in. The piece takes place during the interrogation sequence of a murder case’s prime suspect, which, at face value, seems to be an obvious open-and-shut process. However, when Christina Washburn, one of one of the case’s homicide detectives, receives a mysterious piece of evidence, doubt begins to set in with our detective. Could she be able to pursue this case further amongst the constant growing case files that pressures the station? (Smothered does contain mature material, such as: vulgar language, depictions of traumatic experiences, and references to drug and alcohol usage.)

Drama

SOMERSETT: Benjamin Franklin and the Masterminding of American Independence

May Wuthrich

Based on a wealth of primary and scholarly source material, this under-reported story of the American Revolution, was adapted for a full cast audiobook from the nonfiction title, Somersett by Phillip
Goodrich. It dramatizes how the first court-ordered emancipation of an American slave, James
Somersett, helped unify the colonies in support of American independence. The main figure, working
behind-the-scenes, was none other than Benjamin Franklin, whose actions, along with the abolitionist
members of his London Inner Circle, and with a network of friends and supporters in the colonies,
forced the hand of reluctant southern slaveholders to join the revolution. SOMERSETT will be published by Blackstone as an Audiobook Original on July 1, 2021.

Historical

My Friend Lyssa

Dale Leopold

From the creators of BS de Resistance, it’s the pilot episode of My Friend Lyssa! She’s a mom and voice actor who hosts a sketch comedy variety show in her closet. Is it real, or all in her head?

Comedy

Tales from the Aether - The Witch of Rockwood Cove

Jackie Jorgenson

The Witch of Rockwood Cove follows a migrant witch as she risks discovery in an attempt to cure a newly settled New England town of the blight, rye ergot – hypothesized to be the real-life cause of the Salem witch trials.

Historical Drams

The Martian Broadcast

Christian Roe

1938. Orson Welles and his group of players, The Mercury Theatre On the Air, set out to entertain the masses from coast to coast each week with their radio program. Struggling to find the next show, Orson stumbles upon a science fiction novel written by H.G. Wells and adapts War of the Worlds into the infamous broadcast that plunged an entire nation into panic… but this is not the story of that show, but instead the team of artists who spent a week in creative hell bringing together the show that would end up changing broadcast history forever.

Historical Drama

The New Colossus

Tamara Kissane

THE NEW COLOSSUS audio drama is an unhinged, dark comedy reboot of Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull. Theater fans will enjoy hearing this contemporary adaptation with immersive sound design which tackles

Dark Comedy

The Premature Burial

Poe Theatre on the Air

An audio drama adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Premature Burial,” this production from the anthology series “Poe Theatre on the Air” is a reimagining of the story as a conversation between an asylum inmate and the doctor supervising the facility. ASMR techniques were used to provide a more visceral reaction to the horror of the story. The catalog of Poe Theatre on the Air works are being archived by the Library of Congress for their importance to the historical and culture record of the United States.

Horror

More From the Secret Files of Nellie Bly

Fireside Mystery Theatre

Fact once again becomes inextricably tangled with fiction as we take another tour of the “secret files” of real-life intrepid reporter Nellie Bly. In this series, Nellie has strange encounters with Jules Verne, a female serial killer, and a deranged cult.

Historical Fiction

The Sojourn: Volume One

Daniel Orrett

The Tantalus Cluster is the fragile cradle of humanity. Adrift in the divide between galaxies and surrounded by the vast emptiness of the intergalactic void, the Tantalus Cluster is the only home humanity has ever known. After centuries of reckless colonisation and a violent interstellar war, the delicate ecosystem of Tantalus has begun to collapse, and humanity is gripped by poverty and famine. Desperate and facing extinction, humanity’s only hope is a strange nebula that has suddenly appeared beyond the edge of the cluster. Its shifting clouds may hide a source of salvation for the people of Tantalus, but time is running out.

Science Fiction

Time Enough at Last

Russ McGee

Henry Bemis loves to read. The only problem is that he can find neither the time nor the place to enjoy his favorite pastime. That is until the world is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and Henry Bemis finds himself very much alone…now he may read to his heart’s content, or so he thinks.

Science Fiction

Walking In My Sleep: The Podcast

Seth Shulman

Walking in My Sleep: The Podcast is an immersive audio drama about a man’s vivid, intelligent, and often comical journey of finding his way to adulthood, as a boy and young man born with Cerebral Palsy. Told in a series of adventures in which he’s sometimes the hero, sometimes the loser, and sometimes a little in between. In this episode, part mother and son story, part boy and his dog tale, prepare to be propelled across the vacuum of space, through the dark and sinister bowels of a hospital, and into the imagination of “The Boy Who Fell To Earth”.

Comedy Drama