Talk Radio

Angry Origins
have an S&M relationship with your callers

Before Howard Stern, before Rush Limbaugh, before O'Reilly there was Eric Bogosian . This crazy, coked-up shock jock broke new ground with his rants and rudeness. Fans and fanatics flocked to their radios and to him in search of something savage. Well, in moved mirroring Hairspray and The Producers, Bogosian's play-no-film-no-play is back again to Broadway with only just a few tweaks. LievScheiber plays Bogosian during his heyday in the 1980s right as his Cleveland show is about to go into nationwide syndication. Antisemitism, drug used, idiot callers, political conspiracies, and theatrical fans pump him up and drive his selfish ego to go places that are no longer shocking today. Just like Chorus Line, this play doesn't date well. What was radical and thought provoking then is now cliche and mundane today. No effort was made to bring this irony to light or to modernize the content. The only poignant moment was when the producer say, "We have dead air." I thought, "Do we have a dead medium?" In the age of podcast, satellite radio, and YouTube, can talk radio be engaging or relevant? This is the only new question the play brings to mind but it never dared to answer it with anything more than a "Who gives a f@#$!"