Carlo D'Amore spent years scraping by as an off-Broadway actor before he found the business hiding inside his own street theater. In 2009 he turned a two-page essay about a 19th century murder into The Ryan Case 1873, an interactive show that walked audiences through the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side and earned a Drama Desk nomination. That show became Live In Theater, a company that now drops corporate teams into unrehearsed, three-act mysteries where the CEO and the janitor play by the same rules.
Carlo joins Bald Ambition to talk about what happens when businesses hire actors instead of comedians for their team-building events. He draws a sharp line between short-form improv comedy and the long-form improvisation his actors use to build a real story around a group of strangers, and he explains why COVID pushed Live In Theater onto Zoom and multiplied the company's reach along the way. Clients like Google and Netflix now book sessions between four hundred and six hundred times a year, some returning again and again because a shared story builds trust faster than a slide deck does.
The conversation also covers Carlo's new project helping college students rehearse real interaction through theater, his stance on AI (he uses it to run his business but refuses to let it near his actors), and the math behind walking away from Broadway money to build something nobody else was doing.
What booking a session looks like:
Reach out through liveintheater.com and hear back from the team within 24 hours
Talk through your group's size and what you're celebrating so they can match you to a story
Get a short prep email beforehand (dressing up and mixing a cocktail are optional)
Log onto Zoom, Google Meet, or an in-person New York event and let the actors take it from there
The Guest
Carlo D'Amore is the founder and creative director of Live In Theater (LIT), the interactive theater company he built in New York City in 2009 after his debut show, The Ryan Case 1873, earned a Drama Desk nomination. He is an award-winning actor with Broadway credits including "Summer and Smoke" at the Roundabout Theatre Company and "Latinologues" at the Helen Hayes Theater, along with film and television credits on HBO's "Oz" and ABC's "Pan Am." Live In Theater has since worked with clients including Google, Netflix, and CVS across New York, Madrid, and Austin.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Mookie Spitz. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Mookie Spitz och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
