Live from Mount Olympus | Apollo and Artemis

A dramatic adventure for tweens and listeners of all ages, “Live from Mount Olympus” weaves timeless Greek myths with the artistry of foremost contemporary theater-makers and the imaginative power of audio. Hermes, god of storytellers, travelers, and thieves (Tony Award-winner André De Shields), is our host.

In this season, the god of music has just released his newest single, “Dragon Slayer.” Together, Hermes and Apollo spin marvelous tales of giants and monsters, jealous gods and greedy kings. Yet at its heart, the series is about siblinghood—Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, goddess of all wild things, the moon, and the hunt. Like most brothers and sisters, these divine twins love each other and also drive each other crazy. Apollo counts on Artemis’s level-headed leadership when his impulsive bravado leads to terrible consequences, and Artemis is always ready to leap to Apollo’s side in battle—back to back, bows up. But when Apollo’s jealousy makes him commit an act of terrible cruelty against his sister, he must seek his sister’s forgiveness—or risk the destruction of all of Olympus.

From the dramatic birth of Zeus’s divine twins to the stories of King Midas’s golden touch and the Judgment of Paris, “Live From Mount Olympus: Apollo and Artemis” reimagines iconic Greek myths through dramatic storytelling, immersive sound design, and, for the first time this season, unforgettable original songs composed by Magda Giannikou, who has created the score to all seven seasons of the podcast, and performed by Broadway’s leading talents.

“Live from Mount Olympus” is an Onassis Foundation production. Created and produced by Peabody Award-winning showrunner Julie Burstein, this bold and original audio drama is co-produced by the Brooklyn-based theater ensemble The TEAM, directed by Tony Award-winner Rachel Chavkin, Zhailon Levingston, and multi-disciplinary artist and director Josiah Davis, featuring original songs by Magda Giannikou, and starring legendary actors, including André De Shields and Ato Blankson-Wood. Karen Brooks Hopkins is the executive producer.

“Live from Mount Olympus” is distributed by PRX.

“In deference to the great history of theater making over centuries, it seems both appropriate and dramatically thrilling to wrap up our seventh and final season of ‘Live from Mount Olympus’ with… a musical!

And, as Greek myths originated in the way all ancient stories have done, as oral histories passed down through the ages, we are honored to continue this revered tradition in its most modern format—the Podcast!”

– Karen Brooks Hopkins, Executive Producer

“When I floated the unorthodox idea that this season would be a musical––Apollo is god of music, after all––I was so grateful for guidance from the great Rachel Chavkin, who told me that a character should sing when it’s impossible to express his or her feelings in any other way. Through Magda Giannikou’s beautiful, emotionally resonant songs, the gods show us their hearts: Apollo (Ato Blankson-Wood) boasts about slaying Python; Leto (Kimberly Marable) shows grit and determination as she searches for a place to give birth to her twins; Artemis (Christina Liberus) reveals the depths of her grief; and Eris, goddess of discord (a divinity the inimitable André De Shields has wanted to play forever), declares delight in dissonance. What a deep pleasure to create a ‘Live from Mount Olympus’ season unlike any other with our extraordinary team.”

– Julie Burstein, Creator & Showrunner

“This season is both so thrilling and bittersweet, as our final season at ‘Live from Mount Olympus.’ It feels perfectly fitting that we introduce incredible original songs for the first time as part of a season focused on Apollo, the god of music. And we have assembled a cast that includes fabulous artists from across the Broadway universe, film and television, as well as young performers who’ve grown with the podcast. I’m immensely excited to bring this story of arrogance and humility, loss, redemption, and a bond shared between siblings to our audience.”

– Rachel Chavkin, Director

“Live from Mount Olympus: Apollo & Artemis” stars André De Shields (Hermes, Eris), Ato Blankson-Wood (Apollo), Christina Liberus (Artemis), Libby King (Athena), Marcel Isaiah Martinez (Hyacinthus), Jill Frutkin (Aphrodite), Kimberly Marable (Leto, Fury 2), Eric Berryman (Pan, Dionysus, Zephyrus), Jake Margolin (Orion), Modesto “Flako” Jimenez (Otus), Xavier Pacheco (Ephialtes, Paris), Nehemiah Luckett (Midas), Joanne Hernandez (Daphne), Kristen Sieh (Python, Gaea, Fury 1), Ching Valdes-Aran (Delos), James Harrison Monaco (Marsyas), Divine Garland (Ganymede), Nedra Marie Taylor (Hera), Daniel J. Watts (Eros, Silenus), Ian Lassiter (Zeus), Caroline Hopkins (Midas’s daughter), Natalie Hopkins (Nymph), and Adrienne Hopkins (Nymph).

The “Live from Mount Olympus” creative team includes writer Nathan Yungerberg, composer Magda Giannikou, “The New Yorker” cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein, who creates original illustrations for each episode, and audio producer John Melillo.

Celebrating more than 20 years as a nonprofit public media company, PRX works in partnership with leading independent creators, organizations, and stations to bring meaningful audio storytelling into millions of listeners’ lives. PRX is one of the world’s top podcast publishers, public radio distributors, and audio producers, serving as an engine of innovation for public media and podcasting to help shape a vibrant future for creative and journalistic audio. Shows across PRX’s portfolio of broadcast productions, podcast partners, and its Radiotopia podcast network have received recognition from the Peabody Awards, the Tribeca Festival, the International Documentary Association, and more, including in 2022 when Futuro Media and PRX won a Pulitzer Prize.

Founded in 2004, the TEAM is a Brooklyn-based experimental theater collective spirited by some of the wildest and deepest artists working today. Once described by “The Guardian” as “theatrical excavators of American culture, American dreams, and the American psyche,” the TEAM collaboratively creates new works about the experience of living in the United States today to generate dialogue about the nation’s past, present, and future through production and touring.

To date, the TEAM has created and toured 13 original works. Their work has been seen in New York at the Public Theater, PS122, Vineyard Theatre, the New Ohio Theatre, and The Bushwick Starr; nationally at ArtsEmerson, A.R.T., Walker Art Center, Playmakers Repertory Theatre, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Virginia Tech, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and internationally at the National Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Barbican, Almeida Theatre, and Battersea Arts Centre in London; Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre; Culturgest in Lisbon; the Salzburg Festival; Galway Festival; Perth International Arts Festival; and Hong Kong Arts Festival. They are four-time winners of the Scotsman Fringe First Award, winners of the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize, the Herald Angel (2011), the Edinburgh Total Theatre Award (2008), the Best Production Dublin Fringe Award (2007), and were nominated for a Drama League Award for Outstanding Musical (2012).

After a sold-out run at Under the Radar Festival, the TEAM is currently touring its latest work “Reconstructing.” Co-written by a multiracial collective of 22 artists, this meta-theatrical sonic tapestry weaves the stories of fictional characters, historical figures, and the artists’ own racialized family histories, to ask how, in the aftermath of slavery, we might move through history together. The TEAM is also supporting 7 artists, including Amber Gray and Ato Blankson-Wood, through Petri Projects, its seedling new works lab.