Last week, the Obama administration announced a new initiative to improve a handful of the nation’s worst performing schools through arts education. The Turnaround Arts Initiative has chosen eight schools to receive $14.7 million over three years to integrate art, music, dance, and ...

We’ve been inundated with reports of corporate layoffs and manufacturing jobs vanishing. But the creative class has been particularly hard hit. In an ongoing series for Salon, reporter Scott Timberg writes that the last few years have seen a huge drop-off in jobs in the creative industries. ...

Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer.  This weekend a new production opens on Broadway entitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but it’s not the one George and Ira presented in 1935. ...

Video: a song from the Broadway production

This week, David Ives’ Venus in Fur opened at Manhattan Theatre Club's Friedman Theatre for a limited run, with Nina Arianda playing opposite British actor Hugh Dancy.  The show opened Off Broadway in January 2010 and killed; the New York Times’ critic called Arianda's performance sensational, ...

“Larger-than-life” doesn’t do justice to performer Sandra Bernhard. She can be cartoonishly tough and irreverent, but also intensely sincere. Her breakout role came in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), in which she plays an obsessed fan who helps kidnap the talk show host ...

A novelist returns home to her prominent California Republican parents with the manuscript of a new book — a memoir filled with very dirty laundry. Needless to say, the reunion is vexed. Jon Robin Baitz’s play Other Desert Cities just arrived on Broadway, starring Stockard Channing and Stacey Keach. It’s part comedy ...

In the days after 9/11, late night talk show hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart limped back on screen. A week later, Stewart mused, “They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I gladly would have taken.” ...

Early in 2001, the writer and performer Sarah Jones started working on a one-woman Broadway show called Bridge and Tunnel.  The play, which won a Tony Award, featured Jones playing a diverse cast of characters living in New York – including a middle-aged Pakistani man named Mohammed ...

Over the last several months, Kurt Andersen has been asking guests about their memories of 9/11 and the changes that came after it. Hear responses from Michael Stipe, Jodie Foster, Björk, Suzanne Vega, Robert Lopez, and Miranda July.

Six years before Tony Kushner grabbed the nation’s attention with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Larry Kramer had staged The Normal Heart, about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on the gay community. The Normal Heart premiered...

Slideshow: The Normal Heart on Broadway

If you’ve ever watched South Park, you know that a few of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's favorite things are organized religion and musical theater.  In 2003, they did a musical episode all about Joseph Smith and the founding of Mormonism.  This year the show's creators upped the ante considerably, teaming with composer Robert Lopez to...

Video: Robert Lopez performs “I Believe”

Sleep No More may be the most unusual, fantastical take on Macbeth ever produced.  The London-based theater company Punchdrunk has transformed 100,000 square feet of New York City warehouse space into a meticulously detailed world — a kind of Macbeth theme park with no signage or...

Slideshow: Wandering Through Sleep No More

Marie Curie is the sexiest story in science history and has charmed authors, filmmakers, and playwrights.  Add Alan Alda to the list, who makes his playwrighting debut with Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie.  At the opening gala for the World Science Festival last night, a terrific cast (including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Liev Shreiber) performed a reading.

Listen to an excerpt

How did you spend Monday night? Here in Studio 360, we tapped a keg, lined up some killer acts, and hung out with 150 of our closest friends at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. We'll air the whole show next week, but until then, you can watch some choice excerpts of performances by comedian Eugene Mirman and the band tUnE-yArDs.

The Book of Mormon is the toast of Broadway (with 14 nominations for June’s Tony Awards). Trey Parker and Matt Stone teamed up with Robert Lopez, best known for Avenue Q, to put the spring in the Mormons' steps. In this preview clip of Kurt Andersen's interview with Lopez, the composer deconstructs the song “All-American Prophet” and revives hooks previously lost to the cutting-room floor.

Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega (of the massive 1980s hits "Tom’s Diner" and "Luka") tells the life story of one of her favorite writers in a new one-woman show called Carson McCullers Talks About Love, several decades in the making. In nearly all her work (The Member of the Wedding, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), McCullers wrote about the loneliness of...

Video: Suzanne Vega performs "Song of Annemarie (Terror, Pity, Love)"

Tony Kushner may be the most ambitious playwright of our age.  His Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America grappled with being gay, American politics, and the AIDS crisis.  And he continues to think big: his new play is called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.  It's swarming with outspoken, esoteric, funny...

Slideshow: Scenes from Tony Kushner's new play

No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war.  Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter.

The Book of Mormon is straight-up brilliant, by far the best new musical of the 21st century.

The troubled Broadway production of Spider-Man got even more troubled this week with an actress suffering serious injuries. We asked for your suggestions to save the vexed production, and we’ll hear this week from listener Richard Daniels.