This Nova Scotian’s podcast has become a queer hit—and it’s coming to Halifax for a live show

There is some kismet involved in Dane Stewart’s path to podcast prominence. Long before the Truro native’s show, Resurrection, claimed the top spot on Apple Podcasts’ Arts chart in Canada—and eventually reached #13 in the world—he met a man at a gay bar in Montreal. The year was 2016. It was Montreal Pride, and Stewart, then 25, had gone to march in his first parade. The playwright and self-described “queer oral history enthusiast” had moved to the city as an undergraduate, studying music and English at Concordia, and had started on a master’s degree in fine arts.

The man at the bar was Dan Wylie, already in his early sixties. Despite their age difference, they struck up an easy friendship. The two got to talking about one of Wylie’s ex-boyfriends, Daryl Allen—a playwright himself—who had died of AIDS in 1991. Wylie had kept Allen’s love letters and scripts from unreleased plays. The words struck a chord with Stewart, who couldn’t help but notice the parallels between Allen’s life and his own: Not only in their shared love for the stage, but in their early struggles to come to terms with their sexuality. (“When I realized I was gay, I was really afraid to come out,” Stewart told MTL Blog in 2023. “I didn’t come out to my family until I moved away to Montreal for university.”)

The fact that Allen had died before his work made it to the stage—and in the same year that Stewart was born, no less—lodged itself into the younger playwright’s mind.

Dane Stewart found inspiration for Resurrection in a chance encounter with a man at a gay bar in Montreal. Credit: Concordia University

“I became absolutely obsessed with this man,” Stewart says, speaking by phone with The Coast, “and with giving him the artistic legacy and the platform that he never got while he was alive.”

Soon, it would consume the next six years of his life. So began the first season of Resurrection, an eight-episode podcast series that Stewart and his co-creators describe as “part investigation, part documentary and part love story.” Premiered in 2023, the series chronicles Allen’s life as a gay man living with HIV in the 1980s and the “rabbit hole” that Stewart fell into after he was handed the late artist’s life’s work. Amazon Music named it one of the best podcasts of the year. Now entering its third season, the podcast has found a global audience, earning writeups in The Guardian and The Irish Independent.

And for the first time, it’s becoming a cabaret show.

“Part-podcast, part-cabaret and fully gay”

Season 2 of Resurrection turns its lens outward from Allen’s life to some of the central figures of the AIDS epidemic, from then-US president Ronald Reagan—whose administration called it the “gay plague”—to Anthony Fauci—who, decades before leading the US response to COVID-19, was a “major player” in its response to AIDS (and not always a popular figure, either). But one of the most important figures is Michael Callen.

A “small-town boy” from western Ohio, Callen moved to New York in the late 1970s with dreams of becoming a musician. Like Stewart and Allen, he was gay. And as the AIDS epidemic surged across New York, Callen contracted the disease. It turned him into an activist—first calling for the closure of New York’s bathhouses, before changing his tune and co-authoring How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, which advocated for the widespread use of condoms. “That pamphlet is largely credited with inventing safe sex and, over the years, saving millions of lives,” Stewart says.

Resurrection: The Michael Callen Story is a theatrical spin-off of Dane Stewart’s popular queer history podcast. Credit: Submitted

It’s Callen’s story as an artist and activist—and his relationship with jazz drummer Richard Dworkin—that forms the core of Stewart’s newest work, a live version of Resurrection that he describes as “part-podcast, part-cabaret and fully gay.” It’s a co-production with fellow Truro natives Andrew Morrisey and Andrew Boudreau, friends and former high school classmates who both now work as musicians in New York. (Morrisey is an actor and cabaret singer; Boudreau is a jazz pianist and composer.)

The idea came to Stewart during a walk in Toronto one day, while researching material for the podcast. At the time, Stewart tells The Coast, he was listening to one of Callen’s posthumous albums.

“I stopped in my tracks—I was just overcome with the beauty of the music and how much his voice reminded me of Andrew Morrisey’s,” Stewart says. He messaged his old friend. “I said, ‘Listen to this. We can do a show. I have the story.’ And he was enthusiastically on board, right from the get-go.” From there, Stewart recruited Boudreau, who also agreed to the project. The whole creative process was “surprisingly easy,” Stewart says. “It just sort of felt right.”

There’s an element of personal connection to the show’s material for each of the three Nova Scotians, too: All three of the friends and former classmates identify as queer. Like Callen, all three grew up in a small town. All three left home.

“All of our experiences kind of parallel Michael’s experience,” Stewart says, “wanting to get out of that small town and get into a bigger city where you can find more of a community. We made that decision years later than he did, and yet it still feels so related to what we encountered.”

Halifax show on February 3

The podcast-turned-cabaret show will bring the Nova Scotians back home for a pair of shows this weekend and early next week. The three play a hometown show at Truro’s St. Andrew’s United Church on Saturday, Feb 1, before taking over Dalhousie’s Joseph Strug Concert Hall for a Halifax show on Monday, Feb 3.