The Culture Show Podcast

May 27, 2026 - Live from New York City: Marc Shaiman and Steve Locke

Today on The Culture Show, we're joined by Marc Shaiman, the award-winning composer and lyricist whose work runs from When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle to Hairspray, Smash and Mary Poppins Returns, joins us with his new memoir, Never Mind the Happy. Before the Tonys, the Oscars and the Broadway openings, he was a teenager haunting community theaters, a young musician swept into Bette Midler’s world, and creating a career that would move through the devastation of AIDS, the machinery of Hollywood and the bruising, and thrilling business of making musicals. On June 9th, he'll be at Broadway in Worcester for "An Evening with Mark Shaiman." For tickets and more information, click here [https://tickets.thehanovertheatre.org/]. Then artist Steve Locke joins us with his first career monograph,I Said What I Said [https://delmonicobooks.com/book/steve-locke-i-said-what-i-said/], a new book featuring three decades of work in painting, sculpture and public art. From portraiture to public memory, Locke’s work confronts race, desire, and history — and asks what America is willing to look at.

May 26, 2026 - Danielle Allen, Eve Plumb, and Matthew Shifrin on blind athletics

Today on The Culture Show, Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School, joins us to discuss her  New York Times essay, “Nothing Beats Polarization Like Civics Education [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/civics-education-polarization.html]” She is the author of Our Declaration [https://wwnorton.com/books/Our-Declaration/] and the forthcoming Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat — and the American Revolution — Transformed Britain [https://bookshop.org/p/books/radical-duke-how-one-aristocrat-and-the-american-revolution-transformed-britain-danielle-allen/2a9648f1b7c90650?utm_source=chatgpt.com]. Eve Plumb, best known as Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch, joins us to discuss her new memoir, Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond. She’ll be at First Parish Church in Cambridge on June 4 at 7 p.m. for a Harvard Book Store signing of Happiness Included [https://www.harvard.com/events/list/ticketed-events?utm_source=chatgpt.com]. Matthew Shifrin, founder and CEO of Bricks for the Blind [https://bricksfortheblind.org/], joins us for “AI: Actual Intelligence” with a look at sports and accessibility. From tennis to cricket to rock climbing, Shifrin explores how adaptations to familiar games can be literally game-changing for blind athletes.

May 25, 2026 - Keith Lockhart, Revolutionary Artists, and Paul Revere's Sons of Liberty Bowl

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart was recently honored with the Third Lantern Award at Old North Church, recognizing his role in using music to connect civic life and shared memory. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, he joins The Culture Show to reflect on the power of orchestral music at historic moments.  Zara Anishanslin joins The Culture Show to talk through her latest book “The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.” Zara Anishanslin is a Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware.  As part of Countdown to 2026, we explore Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty Bowl, crafted in 1768 to honor a Massachusetts vote rejecting new British taxes. Engraved with the names of lawmakers who opposed those measures, it’s a key artifact of early resistance. Ethan Lasser, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, joins us for an overview. To learn more about the Sons of Liberty Bowl and the MFA’s exhibitions and programming go here [http://www.mfa.org/].

May 22, 2026 - Wednesday Watch Party: All The President's Men

For this month’s Watch Party, Jared Bowen is joined by Callie Crossley, host of GBH’s Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, and Joyce Kulhawik, Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic and president of the Boston Theater Critics Association, to revisit All the President’s Men. Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting helped uncover the Watergate cover-up.  Released during America’s Bicentennial, with the country still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, the film became one of the great newspaper movies — finding suspense in missed calls, reluctant sources, editors demanding one more confirmation and the dawning realization that a botched break-in may reach into the White House. Fifty years later, we ask how it plays in 2026: as a period piece, or as newly relevant in a time of political distrust, attacks on the press and competing versions of reality.

May 21, 2026 - Imari Paris Jeffries, Geoffrey Kelly on Thirteen Perfect Fugitives, and Edmonia Lewis at the PEM

Imari Paris Jeffries, president and CEO of Embrace Boston, joins us to preview tonight’s Embrace Honors Harry Hom Dow [https://www.embraceboston.org/collective-action/activations/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] event, honoring the first Chinese American admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. Retired FBI agent Geoffrey Kelly joins The Culture Show to discuss “Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist.” After 22 years chasing leads through Boston’s criminal underworld, Kelly reflects on the missing art, the long investigation, and the toll of living inside one of the city’s most enduring mysteries. Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, the George Putnam Curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, joins us to discuss Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone [https://www.pem.org/press-news/pem-debuts-the-first-major-retrospective-exhibition-of-acclaimed-19th-century-black-indigenous-sculptor?utm_source=chatgpt.com], the first major retrospective devoted to the 19th-century Black and Indigenous sculptor.