A bit about me.
I’m Barry Knudsen—a producer, vice president of the company behind SIX in Branson, and a professional entertainer with more than five decades on stage.
If you know me from SIX, you already know a real part of me. It just isn’t the whole of me.
This is where I put some of the other things that occupy my attention: people, work, technology, belief—and the questions I can’t quite leave alone.
A path that started before I chose it.
My father started my brothers and me performing before I had the self-awareness to make an informed choice about the career I wanted. What began that way became a working lifetime.
I became one of the original Knudsen Brothers and, eventually, a member, co-owner, and producer of SIX in Branson. Along the way, my responsibilities have included creative work, production, and the practical business of working with people.
There’s the show, and there’s everything required to put it on. Rehearsals, decisions, personalities, problems to solve. Working with your brothers adds a family history to the business relationship. None of that fits very neatly into a list of career highlights.
What keeps me interested.
I’m interested in the gap between how things are supposed to work and what happens when actual people get involved. That takes me into human behavior, family and work, technology and AI, belief, certainty, and the business of getting along with people who see things differently.
A neat explanation can be useful. I still want to know whether it holds up outside the explanation. That includes my own conclusions, which don’t deserve a free pass just because I’m fond of them.
I write things down from time to time to work through a question or put an experience into words. I’m not setting myself up as an authority on everybody else’s life. I have enough to figure out about my own.
Being seen isn’t the same as being understood.
I’m neurodivergent, with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I also live with major depressive disorder (MDD) and mild obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and I’m deeply introverted. Depression has been part of my life since I was a teenager. These aren’t separate compartments in my life; I experience them together. The person you see performing is genuinely me, but that performance doesn’t tell you everything about what life feels like behind it.
I’ve had a long career. I’ve also had a difficult time with things people watching a show wouldn’t necessarily see. Neither fact makes the other untrue.
I’m including this because leaving it out would leave out something important. But it isn’t the explanation for everything I think, do, or find interesting. If some of it sounds familiar, then we have something in common.