90 stories from Studio 360
Before it was even completed, the buzz surrounding the musical Hamilton was already deafening. Now, after an extremely successful run at New York's Public Theater, Hamilton has moved to Broa…
When Yowei Shaw was in college, her parents' relationship started to change. Maybe it was empty nest syndrome, maybe it was a midlife crisis; but after taking a few dance lessons on board a …
Who would have thought that the fresh-faced, dopey bartender on the TV show Cheers would turn into one of the most versatile, prolific actors of his time? Woody Harrelson has played a …
Hilary Hahn is a heavy hitter in classical music, a violinist who debuted at 12 and recorded the Bach partitas at 18. She's powered through the repertoire, mastering Paganini, the Mozart son…
Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer. There's a new production on Broadway now entitled …
Dirty Projectors manage to be both avant-garde and accessible " the band plays experimental rock you can still dance to. They've collaborated with Björk and David Byrne, and been covered…
It isn't easy to put a fresh spin on A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most acclaimed plays in American theatre, with its caricatured Brando scream of "Stella!" A new production on Broadw…
Canadian folk-rock musicians " Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Cowboy Junkies, k.d. lang, to name a few " have made it big south of the border while retaining something essentially Canadian in th…
A couple of years ago, Kurt wrote a short story for a collection edited by Neil Gaiman " his first work of science fiction " with a Christmas peg buried deep inside. When we decided to creat…
Thousands of people filled the lawn of the Michigan state capitol in Lansing this past Monday to watch female members of the state's house and senate perform The Vagina Monologues. The perfo…
WNYC listener Julie Bayley grew up watching daytime talk shows to catch comics like Rodney Dangerfield. But there weren't any comedians like her: female and black.
Then Bayley saw Whoopi Gol…
In Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, a black family buys a house in an all-white neighborhood " and even before they move in, the neighbors are up in arms. Karl Lindner, a …
Nina Arianda is the it-girl on Broadway " she's nominated for a Tony for her performance in David Ives' comedy Venus In Fur. The show is a play within a play: a writer has adapted an…
The 66th annual Tony Awards are Sunday, June 10. If you've been meaning to brush up on your Broadway, now's the time. Here's a round-up of Kurt Andersen's conversations with some of the nomi…
A generation ago, the singer-songwriter Dave Alvin founded the rootsy-rock band The Blasters with his brother Phil in Los Angeles " and they made an indelible mark on the early 1980's punk s…
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…
The years since 2009 have been good for Michael Jackson impersonators. After the pop star died on the verge of a comeback show, fans have wanted to see the closest thing available. "They wan…
As the country has battled the Great Recession, we've been inundated with reports of corporate layoffs and manufacturing jobs vanishing. But there's another group of American workers that ha…
In the spring of 2010, visitors to New York's Museum of Modern Art could find Marina Abramović, the self-described "grandmother of performance art," holding court. She sat silently, al…
Humans love a well-told story and scientists are beginning to understand why. According to a 2010 study by three Princeton researchers, the act of listening to, and comprehending, a narrativ…
This past weekend The Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened in downtown Las Vegas. Supporters hope the new $470 million cathedral to the arts shows the rest of the country that Vegas i…
Merrill Garbus is the performer and multi-instrumentalist behind tUnE-yArDs " a music project that blends African-inspired rhythms and vocals with electric bass and saxophone. But she …
The Brooklyn-based comedian Eugene Mirman is the stand-up king of hipsterville. He was a regular on the HBO series Flight of the Concords and now appears on Adult Swim's Delocated " and you …
In 2009 the composer Eve Beglarian spent four months traveling down the Mississippi River " from the Headwaters in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. She made the trip mostly in a kay…
Tesla's biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison's monopoly on DC power. Author and monologist Mike Daisey …
