June's bustin' out all over, and we're bustin' out one last classic episode before we get back to some new episodes coming later this month. And since June is Pride Month and the month of the Tony Awards, we're serving up a "two birds, one stone" situation by reairing an episode that falls squarely in both categories: La Cage aux Folles!

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In honor of pride month, this week is a special episode focused on the franchise that began life as a landmark French boulevard stage comedy, and was then adapted into acclaimed films and musical. And even though the love story at the center of the story was between two men, it has captured the hearts of audiences from all sexual orientations. It also answers the age old question: what happens when you put the composer of Hello Dolly!, the director of West Side Story, and Edna Turnlad in a room together? The answer: Broadway magic.

Rob teaches Ray about the history of Jean Poiret’s play La Cage Aux Folles and its many adaptations; how competing producers (including ThWAT favorite Allan Carr) fought to secure the chance to both film and musicalize La Cage; Jerry Herman’s hummable, Tony-winning score and the anthem it provided the gay rights movement; Nathan Lane’s breakout movie performance; and all the ways in which this property has been and continues to be celebrated by audiences across the world.

If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon.

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

Mike Wallace The Homosexuals 1967 - YouTube

La Cage Aux Folles (1979) movie review - Sneak Previews with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel - YouTube

Epiphany - George Hearn (1982) - YouTube

La Cage aux Folles 2 Trailer

La Cage aux Folles 3 Trailer

"Color and Light" from Sunday in the Park with George

Columbo Pilot Episode - “Prescription Murder” costarring Gene Barry - Clips - YouTube

I Am What I Am - YouTube

Song on the Sand (La Da Da Da) - YouTube

Next up in our social platform retrospective: Napster! TikTok may currently be the place where up-and-coming musicians are finding their audience and where labels like Universal have banned their artists from sharing music. But rewind a couple decades and there was one indisputable home of music on the internet: Napster. Only one problem: it was probably all illegal.

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Ah, to be 19 again. It's a time of possibilities, insecurities, of worrying about what adulthood is really going to be like. On the other hand, if you're Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker, your worries at 19 were a little bigger. As in, "multimillion-dollar legal battles with the entire music industry" bigger. And all because of a piece of software that let you listen to and download music from all across the internet...without paying the artists. What could go wrong?

Ray teaches Rob about how a crazy idea on an Internet chat forum grew into the software start-up Napster; how Ray can trace his love of Monty Python to the early days of digital music downloads; how the music industry was forced to reckon with the reality that physical media had become a relic of the past; why pissing off Lars Ulrich is a bad idea; and why Napster's brief and shining moment in the world of online music streaming was the beginning of a trend that completely changed the way the world listens to music.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

The Guardian

Time