Radio theater after the wheels come off.
Rude Alchemy turns radio theater into a messy, theatrical comedy machine. Recent episodes move between Bainbridge school mayhem, animal fable fantasy, Poe adaptation, and Chatter and Lore.
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Rude Alchemy is a serialized audio comedy that keeps one foot in radio theater and the other in full comic collapse. Its world is narrated with grand, overstuffed ceremony, then undercut by interruptions, verbal panic, crude character logic, and credits that sound like they might derail at any second. recent episodes shows several modes rather than one fixed format. “Carver Cranebottom: Academy! Episode 1” and “Christmas at Bainbridge: A Carver Academy Christmas Special OR The Christmas Bone!” carry the Bainbridge academy strain, full of school melodrama, investigation, theatrical names, and emotional chaos dressed in old institutional clothing. The Beastiary episodes move into fable territory. There are talking animals, enclosures, nocturnal creatures, elaborate escape thinking, fake sports framing, and a narrator who cannot always keep the story from showing its machinery. The live Halloween special, “The Black Cat by E.A. Poe,” shows the group adapting Poe while leaving room for the looseness of performance. Chatter and Lore episodes sit beside the fiction rather than inside it. They talk about Rude Alchemy, run trivia, revisit quotes, expand the ridiculous universe, and joke about the work’s own uneven popularity. That self-awareness matters. The show is not simply random loudness; it keeps returning to literary forms, radio-drama devices, fables, mock history, and creator commentary, then corrodes them with vulgarity and antic timing. Its comedy can be harsh, body-minded, and proudly impolite. Its storytelling still has architecture. A character may be trapped in a mystery, an enclosure, a school, or a Poe tale, but the larger joke is often the act of telling the story at all. Rude Alchemy suits a listener who likes dense scripted absurdity, theatrical voice work, and comedy that treats elegance as something to trip over. It is best understood as madcap audio fiction with lore, not a clean sketch feed or a straight literary adaptation series.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants scripted audio comedy with ornate narration, recurring storyworlds, and deliberately impolite absurdity. It is a fit for someone comfortable with abrasive jokes and messy meta-commentary around the fiction.
What sets it apart: Rude Alchemy stands apart by mixing historical-fantasy comedy, literary pastiche, animal fable, school farce, live adaptation, and creator-side lore into one unruly audio-drama universe. The show’s polish is in the construction, not in pretending everything is tidy.
A demented but lovable Narrator is your guide on a deliciously impolite audial frolic through multiple mad storyworlds of twisted history. rudealchemy.substack.com
A 1945 Sherlock Holmes script meets zero rehearsal, and you get to enjoy every wrong turn.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A profane Christmas at Bainbridge turns loneliness, detective-story vanity, and holiday feeling into a bleak radio-theater squabble.
Rude Alchemy's Christmas special starts with a lonely narrator trying to draft the audience into a Christmas family, then almost immediately losing faith in the gesture.
A live Poe adaptation where technical chaos, comic asides, and cigarette ads roughen the macabre mood.
Rude Alchemy Live gives Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" a jagged, stage-lit charge, with Andy and Tom working through technical trouble before the adaptation settles in.
A rowdy quiz-room detour where genealogy, odd livestock, and draft-horse confusion pull the score below zero.
Rude Alchemy's Chatter and Lore treats its expanded-universe side room as a loose quiz table, with the creators circling back to The Bestiary, fumbling through the opening, and testing each other on genealogy and rare livestock.
A peacock's escape plan becomes a dead-serious science project with a violently distracted baseball broadcast alongside it.
Rude Alchemy's "The Bestiary" treats a peacock's bid for freedom as both barnyard farce and overbuilt research project. The bird studies books, probes the weakness of an abandoned cave-in tunnel, works out the jump needed to clear the paddock walls, then turns scrap metal and an…
A baseball booth slips into a zoo fable where animal appetite keeps unsettling the bedtime-story shape.
Rude Alchemy opens in a baseball booth, where a father and son are trying to find their way back to each other while the game keeps butting in.
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
Rude Alchemy's '75 Christmas at Bainbridge: A Carver Academy Christmas Special OR The Christmas Bone!' turns Bainbridge Academy for Boys into a Christmas whodunit after Interim Headmaster Fat is found dead with a bone in his head.
["Rude Alchemy Live stages Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat with Andy and Tom, plus a Camel Cigarettes sponsor block that frames the reading as a live broadcast.", "The hosts joke about Andrew having given birth and say the performance cannot be edited, which keeps the opening loose and deliberately messy.", "Poe's narrator says he will die tomorrow, then traces the story from a gentle childhood and a wife who loves animals to Pluto, the black cat they bring home.", "Alcohol, a house fire, and a second black cat with a white chest patch push the story toward the cellar, where the narrator's fear hardens into obsession."]
Rude Alchemy's 'Chatter and Lore' opens with Andy, Andrew, Brian, Tom, and Michael Hahn, the show's resident sound designer, in a room where they tell first-time listeners to start at the beginning and hear The Bestiary first.
Rude Alchemy's "The Bestiary, Episode 1" combines fake baseball commentary with a radio-theater story about zoo animals, including a lion, tortoise, peacock, and tawny owl.
Rude Alchemy's second episode of The Bestiary follows a lion, peacock, and tortoise planning escape from a zoo after hearing about a world beyond their enclosure.
Rude Alchemy’s “Chatter and Lore” functions as an after-show for Carver Crane Bottom Academy, with Andy Wertner, Andrew Cain, Ryan Whalen, and Thomas Hodgkin reviewing characters, jokes, and production.
Rude Alchemy's “Carver Cranebottom Academy: Episode 4” follows Basil's investigation into the stablemaster's missing 32nd tooth while Carver and Cordelia prepare for Bainbridge's masquerade ball.
Rude Alchemy's "Carver Cranebottom Academy!
Rude Alchemy's "Chatter and Lore" episode combines a timed spelling bee with a fictional reading from A Beginner's Guide to Runic Blasphemies.
Rude Alchemy’s “64 Poe Green and the Ghost Machine, Episode 7” continues Poe Green’s supernatural conflict with Pa, Mitchell, Satan, and a demonic shit golem.
Rude Alchemy’s Andy, Andrew, Tom, and Ryan revisit early documents and emails through a “Who Said That?” quiz about the project’s origins.
In Rude Alchemy Episode 62, Pa and Rafe confront Tangier after hiding in an abandoned house while Poe Green and Missandra emerge from the ruins of an Ectoplasmite estate.
Rude Alchemy's "Poe Green and the Ghost Machine, Episode 5" opens with Poe Green restored in a robotic sex doll modeled after K-pop icon Im Yoon Ah while missing the memories surrounding his death.
Rude Alchemy's Andy, Andrew, Tom, and Brian use “Chatter and Lore” to discuss the show's stalled seasons, live productions, Halloween and Christmas specials, and expanding fictional universe.
Rude Alchemy Episode 59 presents Carver Cranebottom and Basil Basilton aboard the HMS Dunweller, where a murdered boy and Princess Fortuna's cyanide bottle create a deliberately unstable mystery.
Rude Alchemy performs a live, unrehearsed version of a 1945 Sherlock Holmes Christmas radio script with Andy, Andrew, Tom, and Ryan.
Rude Alchemy’s “The Jabez Flintwick Halloween Special” follows Jabez Flintwick from his flight after the Salem battle to a supernatural assignment in Millsville, Pennsylvania.
Rude Alchemy’s four creators—Andy, Andrew, Thomas, and Ryan—use “Chatter and Lore” to discuss the Buffoon season, production choices, and stories from the show’s fictional universe.
Rude Alchemy’s “The Buffoon, Episode 3” concludes a grotesque radio-theatre story with Befunde, a trick guillotine, and a village revolt.
Rude Alchemy's "Chatter and Lore" episode 54 discusses the delayed third and final episode of The Buffoon after Tom's daughter Ruth Agnes arrived a week early on July 17.
Rude Alchemy's "The Buffoon, Episode 2" follows Henri of Eguishim as he prepares an exiled group of buffoons for their annual satire of the Duke.
Rude Alchemy's "The Buffoon, Episode 1" follows Henri, the exiled brother of village ruler LeDuc, as he encounters starving clown exiles planning to return for Buffoon Day.
Rude Alchemy’s live special presents an unrehearsed performance of a Sherlock Holmes radio script based on “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.” Andy, Ryan Whalen, and Tom Hodgkin perform Holmes, Watson, police officials, and suspects while improvising around a stolen diamond-and-sapphire necklace.
Rude Alchemy creators Andy, Tom, Ryan, and Andrew mark the 50th Chatter and Lore episode with questions about the Brough, Carver Crane, and Jabez Flintwick universes.
Rude Alchemy’s “49 Bruff Taxwynd: Sky Sailor, Episode 8” follows Brough Taxwin and Fable G.
Rude Alchemy’s four creators—Andy, Andrew, Thomas Hotchkin, and Ryan—discuss the Bruff Taxwind Sky Sailor universe, a possible 25-to-30-seat live show, and the group’s earlier retreat in New York state.
Rude Alchemy's “47 Bruff Taxwynd: Sky Sailor, Episode 7” follows Brough and Fable after Tangier's boys attack them in a secluded Sky City.
A narrator introduces a subversive radio theater podcast set in 2015, then continues a historical fiction serial about Jabez Flintwick during the American Revolution.
A narrator introduces a serialized historical fantasy comedy audio drama set in a dystopian 2015 where radio theater is outlawed.
The creators introduce their show Rude Alchemy and discuss the current season Jabez Flintwick Salem Patriot, including a game of Who Said That?
A demented narrator introduces a serialized audio drama about Jabez Flintwick, a recruiter in Salem during the American Revolution, blending historical fiction with absurdist comedy.