Yuri Rasovsky – författare

Inspired by the classic silent film of 1919, this original audio play won the Independent Publishers Award in 1998 for best direct-to-audio production. John de Lancie stars as a young poet who visits a fair one night with his friend and girlfriend. Entering Dr. Caligari’s tent, they meet the mysterious Cesare, a kind of zombie, who is neither alive nor dead—and who forecasts doom for our high-strung protagonist and his friends.

Combining the directness of an old-time radio play and the language and themes of high psychological drama, this unique production was written, produced and directed by Peabody and Audie Award–winner Yuri Rasovsky and features a superb cast.

The insidious Fleet Street barber slit his first throat in an 1846 "penny dreadful," one of those gaudy serialized novels that gleefully offered thrills and gore to sensation-hungry Victorians. TitledThe String of Pearls, it told of Sweeney Todd, whose shop stood next to St. Dunstan''s Church, just a few blocks from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, he robbed and murdered hundreds of customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them to an underground bakery of one Mrs. Lovett, whose pie shop was a few blocks away. She ground the cadavers into stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite midday repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and who got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday couldbeyour lunch today!

Before the serial''s final chapters even hit the stands, the first stage version, pirated from the already published installments, was packing them in at a London theater. Since then there have been numerous stage, literary, and screen versions of the story, most notably the hit Sondheim musical. Blackstone Audio has commissioned this, the first audio version of the tale, from the Audie® award-winning Hollywood Theater of the Ear (The Sherlock Holmes Theatre,The Oresteia). With tongue in cheek, writer/producer/director Yuri Rasovsky has gone all the way back to the original penny dreadful to imbue an old string of pearls with new luster—and fresh blood.

With the premiere of two new film versions of the Snow White tale, Blackstone enters the fray with its own adult, edgy, and not altogether serious full-cast exposé of fairy-taledom. At last it can be told! Was Snow White really as pure as the driven snow? Did her allegedly wicked stepmother get a bum rap from the Grimm brothers? What went on behind the closed Dutch doors of the dwarves’ cottage? How many handsome princes does it take to screw in a light bulb? These and other burning questions may or may not be answered in this new pseudogothic audio play that Blackstone commissioned from award-winning author and audio dramatist Yuri Rasovsky.

Blackstone is pleased to present the first ever audio recordings of the only two Holmes plays written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This specially commissioned production by the Hollywood Theater of the Ear is a unique, must-have audio for all Sherlockians.

In Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarity, the Napoleon of crime, plots with would-be blackmailers to have Holmes killed. And the normally love-proof Holmes falls for an exceptional woman.

What is the secret of the shocking death of poor Enid’s sister, whose dying words were, “the speckled band”? Only Holmes can find the answer and save a helpless girl from certain death in The Speckled Band.

When Holmes retired, it created a financial crisis for his friend Watson, who owes money to mobsters who want either their cash or his blood. The surprising upshot is: Ghastly Double Murder in Famed Detective’s Flat, a one-act comedy by producer-director Yuri Rasovsky, here receiving its audiobook premiere.

Originally broadcast nationwide in 1993, this meticulously researched five-part historical drama is being published by Blackstone to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday

This production reveals the multifaceted, complex Franklin’s little-known adventures in London before the Revolution. For fifteen years, he lived on Craven Street off the Thames, where he established a surrogate family, began his autobiography, and became America’s most famous citizen.

As tensions heated up between the Mother Country and her colonies, Franklin became embroiled in intrigue, espionage, and even a duel. The British government believed him “the head of all the rebels” and set out to have him hanged. He escaped only hours before arresting magistrates came banging on his Craven Street door. He was at sea sailing for home when “the shot heard ’round the world” rang out at Lexington.