Chicago
Podcast So Fun It’s “Criminal”
by | Feb 12, 2024 2:50 pm
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Phoebe Judge
Vic Theatre
Chicago
2/10/24
“I’m Phoebe Judge,” said Phoebe Judge, and the entire audience burst into applause.
It was recognition from a room full of enthusiastic listeners to her popular podcast, Criminal, Saturday at Chicago’s Vic Theatre. The show was celebrating its tenth anniversary with its first live tour since 2019.
Judge, dressed all in black, stood in front of a microphone with a music stand holding her script. Podcast co-creator Lauren Spohrer sat quietly at a table on stage left, with a laptop and a cue sheet to trigger a myriad of audio clips, video clips, or animations by Julienne Alexander projected on the backdrop screen, a stark white compared to the largely black-dressed stage. Audience members, stacked high into the balcony of the Vic, nearly packed the house (it wasn’t quite sold out), listening intently.
Criminal is a show about its titular subject; it’s one of the most popular true-crime podcasts. It approaches criminality from a variety of angles. This is not a “murder of the week”-style podcast, in that it shifts perspectives on criminality from investigation to an examination of the softer, more entertaining sides of pettier crime. Each episode contains an in-depth story featuring Judge’s narration, interspersed with audio clips of assorted parties to the episode’s crime in question. This live show, however, contained several stories.
The evening started with a small introduction to one of the more entertaining sting operations in criminal history: Operation Flagship, carried out by U.S. Marshalls and the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police, known as the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team (or FIST), in 1985. In a near-comical setup, assorted fugitives, including some of the U.S.’s most wanted, were sent false news that they had won two tickets to the upcoming Super Bowl, and that they should report to a given location to claim them. Upon arrival, claimants were instead arrested.
Judge would often end each story with a variant of “I don’t know, that’s it,” an ephemeral plea for the powers of audio editing to do what they do for her podcast, yet live. The feeling of watching a podcast live is the closest thing one gets to attending a radio play these days, and the same atmospheric conditions apply: a rapt audience with relatively little to visually focus on stage (the video, photos, and animations added to the experience, but not every story had them); and a well-loved, familiar voice and cadence, pausing every few syllables, in a rhythm heard in a thousand earbuds and headphones nationwide. There’s a nostalgia in listening to audio recordings and beloved podcasts. They follow us in our routines, our chores, even our daily walks.
The show was largely new material for the live tour specifically; as such, playing with visuals was clearly emphasized. One key example is the story of Matt Stopera, who saw his cell phone stolen in 2015, but through the modern miracle of iCloud, began to see photos he didn’t take populate his new phone, including a Chinese man taking several selfies in front of an orange tree. Stopera tweeted about it, which sparked a viral manhunt for his Chinese counterpart, taking the search even to China’s own version of Twitter, Weibo. It turned out Li Hongjun, or Brother Orange, as he became known on Weibo, had bought Stopera’s phone secondhand. Stopera, naturally, flew to China to meet Hongjun, and the two became fast best friends.
Judge alluded to the fact that while she currently lives in Durham, NC, she is from Chicago. Shortly after the intermission, she launched into a handmade deck entitled “All About Me,” first designed to share with the fully remote Criminal team as a way for everyone to know each other better, and now transformed into a peek into the woman behind the unflappable voice of Criminal. She likes hats, sausages, and, importantly, magic: her slideshow included a small video of her performing a trick via Zoom.
Her final story touched on magic as well, following the tale of a professional pickpocket and mentalist, Ava Do, who transitioned to information theft, married another illusion artist named Apollo Robbins, and had a child who sat down to teach Judge some tricks. Spohrer was the recipient of a math trick in which the child, about seven years old, guessed a number she had thought of. Ava taught Judge how to anticipate hand movement and win $20; the last part of the segment showed projected text messages as Judge realized she had actually lost $20 and barely noticed.
Magic indeed — shifting perception away from what is actually going on. In many ways the podcast medium is its own magic, bringing intimate voices into your ears and taking you on a journey, blind to setting. Who knows where the next story will take us?
