A live audio drama that picks up where the first nationwide African-American radio drama, produced in Chicago by Richard Durham more than sixty years ago, left off. The show walked a daring line between reform and revolution, and was shut down by its network in 1950, as McCarthyism and anti-communism tightened its grip on American broadcasting. As well as drawing on the archive of Destination Freedom (now branded Destination Freedom Black Radio Days, this program illuminates a largely unknown, but important chapter in the history of human rights and tells how radio played its part from the very beginning. That boundary-breaking program, Destination Freedom, dramatized the lives of great figures in African-American and other people of color past and present, continues in its spirit with all-new scripts. This series honors and expands on that theme. Part of the Broadway Podcast Network
https://broadwaypodcastnetwork.com/podcast/destination-freedom-black-radio-days/
episode 16: The Eclectic - Conversation with artist Sheryl McCallum - singer, actor, writer
Join us for our conversation with artist Sheryl McCallum. McCallum is a graduate of Denver South High School who found lasting success on Broadway playing several roles in Disney’s The Lion King.
Connection is also a recurring theme in how McCallum and David Nehls came to make “Miss Rhythm,” which is based on the 1996 book “Miss Rhythm: The Autobiography of Ruth Brown, Rhythm and Blues Legend” by Brown and Andrew Yule. McCallum and Nehls first met in New York in the 1990s, reconnected in Denver a few years ago doing musical theater, and seized the opportunity that the COVID pandemic afforded them (in that “lemons, meet lemonade” way) to create the show.
Since returning from New York City to take care of her mother, Denver native McCallum has been making inroads in the area’s theater scene. In New York, she was in the Broadway cast of “The Lion King” as well as a performer in City Center’s Encores! concert series. In her first Denver show, McCallum played a town elder in the Curious Theatre Company’s production of “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet,” part of MacArthur Fellow Terrell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays.
Since then, McCallum’s appeared in shows at Curious, Cherry Creek Theatre, the Aurora Fox, the Arvada Center, and Miners Alley. It was at that Golden theater — during artistic director Len Matheo’s much-needed Quarantine Cabaret — that McCallum and Nehls test-drove a tribute about the woman who became known as the Queen of R&B.
Ruth Brown, After a string of hit songs — “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and “5-10-15 Hours” among them — the Atlantic record label where she switched from ballads to R&B was referred to winkingly as “The House That Ruth Built.”
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