Listen Score
LS 39
Global Rank
TOP 2%

ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗

Update frequency:
biweekly
Average audio length:
60 minutes
Guest interviews
Has sponsors
English
United States
180 episodes
since June 4, 2020
episodic

LATEST EPISODE 🔗

Christian Slater paying £100 for a hat might sound like a throwaway festival story, but it’s also a perfect time capsule of a moment when a whole scene was coming into focus. We pick up our conversation with Hamish McCormick, founder of Carnival Cinema, to revisit the early La Clique years at the F…

SEARCH PAST EPISODES

Search past episodes of the Way of the Showman.

PREVIOUS EPISODES

A broken arm, a cheap camera, and a circus scene that did not wait for permission. We sit down with my old friend Hamish McCormick, known worldwide as Carnival Cinema, to trace how a performer becomes the person quietly documenting everyone else, and why that insider perspective changes what a live…
A dragon suit doesn’t make you memorable. The work does. I’m sitting down with Piff the Magic Dragon in the Flamingo’s basement studio to get brutally honest about what it actually takes to build a successful comedy magic career and keep a Las Vegas residency alive in a town packed with legendary c…
What happens when you have a clear artistic vision for a new circus school show, but the funding catalog expires, the gatekeepers want something “easy to book,” and the words you use accidentally make it sound like a museum? Captain Frodo sits down with Jay Gilligan to unpack the very real behind-t…
Free tickets should fill a theater, right? Then why do so many “sold out” charity nights play to rows of empty seats, and why do artists keep returning to ticket price as a stand-in for value? Jay Gilligan and I pick up our Malmö hotel-room conversation and follow a single thought experiment, money…
You can feel the difference between a performer who “does tricks” and a performer who builds a world. We sit down with Malin Nilsson to get inside that world building process: how stagecraft, mentors, and sharp editing turn variety magic into something that feels inevitable, alive, and deeply perso…
When the world feels like it’s burning, making a show can start to feel absurd and even selfish. We sit with that discomfort and ask the question out loud: what is the purpose of magic, theater, and live performance when war headlines and daily suffering are only a scroll away? The honest answer is…
A crowd cheering can feel like love, right up until it wrecks the timing of the act. From a Malmö hotel room while props are being prepped, we dig into a surprisingly deep question: what does a performer owe an audience, and what does an audience unknowingly take away from a performer when they bri…
The brutal part of juggling isn’t the hard trick. It’s the simple demand that never changes: once the object leaves your hand, you either catch it or you don’t. From a snowy, sleety Malmö cabaret week at Victoria Theater, we sit down in a hotel room surrounded by ribbons, feathers, and confetti whi…
You can feel it when an act is more than a list of tricks, but why does that feeling happen? I sit down with Menno van Dyke, artistic director of Circusstad Festival in Rotterdam, to dissect one of my favorite examples of contemporary circus craft: Juggling Tango, his long running collaboration wit…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Captain Frodo, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.