Listen: LITTLE KNOWN FACTS with Ilana Levine and Special Guest, Howard Sherman

Little Known Facts is a weekly podcast hosted by stage and film actress Ilana Levine. With over 150 interviews to date with today's most successful artists, Levine engages her celebrity guests in intimate conversations that are hilarious, vulnerable, revealing and inspiring. Ilana's unique brand of celebrity interview has been called "Podcast Vérité," because her conversations are unfiltered, raw, honest and uniquely funny.

Today's episode features theatre administrator, writer, and advocate Howard Sherman. Sherman has been executive director of the American Theatre Wing and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, managing director of Geva Theatre, general manager of Goodspeed Musicals, and public relations director of Hartford Stage, as well as interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts. He has also held administrative positions at the Westport Country Playhouse, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays.

What are his thoughts on the return of Broadway? "I think if you asked me a couple of weeks ago, I might have been slightly less optimistic than I am today," he said.

"I think there is definitely places and people who want to rush the re-opening. I've long been a believer that we should not rush it- we should do it at the point at which it is safe an reasonable... I think it's at least in sight. The finish line isn't in sight; it's off in the distance, maybe. But we're gonna get there."

Since 2012, he has been the US columnist and a feature writer for The Stage newspaper in London, and in 2018 was named Contributing Editor of Stage Directions magazine. His writing has appeared in a number of other publications including Slate, The New York Times, The Guardian, and American Theatre magazine.

Howard frequently consults, writes and speaks on issues of censorship and artists' rights in both academic and professional theatre and he created the Arts Integrity Initiative in 2015 to focus on those efforts. He has delivered keynote addresses for, among others, the Educational Theatre Association, KCACTF, Florida Association for Theatre Education, and the Texas Educational Theatre Association's Arts Program Administrators Conference. He was cited as one of the Top 40 Free Speech Defenders in 2014 by the National Coalition Against Censorship and received the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund's "Defender" Award in 2015.

A native of New Haven, Connecticut and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Howard resides in New York with his wife, producer Lauren Doll.