Arts

Oh, the questions that circulated when this summer's Shakespeare in the Park revival of Into the Woods was announced.

Who'd play the Baker, that woebegone would-be father at the center of Stephen Sondheim's fractured musical fairy tale?

Who'd step into the star role of the vengeful Witch, played notably by Bernadette Peters in the premiere and by Vanessa Williams in the 2002 revival?

How would the show work in a giant outdoor amphitheater, amid the trees and lawns and urban clatter of Central Park?

As athletes have sprinted and soared their way to bronze, silver and gold in London, Morning Edition has celebrated the Olympics with the Poetry Games: We invited poets from around the globe to compose original works about athletes and athletics and asked you to be the judges.

The nationwide drought that has withered crops in more than 30 states shows no sign of letting up. But as Katharine Hepburn established in her film, The Rainmaker, that doesn't mean hope has to dry up.

"I dreamed we had a rain, a great big rain," she tells her brothers, only to be told that "a drought's a drought, and a dream's a dream."

This is the first in a three-part series about major American networks trying to appeal to a broader Latino audience.

In a glass-walled conference room at Fox News in New York, reporter Bryan Llenas and two of his colleagues discuss the nature and success of their news site, Fox News Latino, largely aimed at English-speaking Hispanics.

Maybe a dozen feet away, two pundits can be seen heatedly arguing in a Fox News TV studio.

It might seem unfair to compare an artist's latest work to his masterpiece from over 20 years ago, but Spike Lee not only appears to welcome the comparison, but invites it. From the steamy, sweaty, summer-in-Brooklyn setting to its loose structure to its incendiary climax, Lee's new Red Hook Summer is immediately identifiable as the direct descendant of 1989's Do the Right Thing.

There's so little craziness today in American movies — even American independent movies. Filmmakers are so busy trying to look as if they're not trying too hard that their strained effortlessness is sometimes the only thing that comes through.

Late in The Green Wave, a soulful look back at the brief 2009 people's movement for democratic elections in Iran, a former United Nations prosecutor and human rights activist observes that the protest, despite being brutally quelled by the forces of President Ahmadinejad, was "a tidal wave" that would sweep through the Middle East.