The Broadway musical Hairspray was the big winner this week at the Tony Awards. It won awards for best direction, score, book and costume. Hairspray is based on Waters' 1988 film of the same name.
He starred on Broadway in M Butterfly, and in the TV series Law & Order: SVU and HBO's Oz. He's the author of the new book Following Foo (the electronic adventures of the Chestnut Man). It's about the premature birth of his twin sons in August 2000. The twins suffered a rare medical disorder. One of them died shortly after birth, and the other twin, Jackson Foo, was in neonatal intensive care for three months. At the time Wong began an e-mail correspondence with family and friends on Jackson Foo's progress.
Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Say You Will, the new CD by Fleetwood Mac, their first collection of new material in eight years. It's also without Christine McVie.
The 78-year-old singer is currently performing at Birdland in New York City. Previously, Carroll spent 25 years playing at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. This year, she received three lifetime achievement awards; one of them was the Kennedy Center's Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Lifetime Achievement Award. Carroll has a number of albums to her credit; her latest is the new solo album Morning in May.
Stephan Bognar is a field agent for the San Francisco-based international non-profit wildlife conservation group, WildAid. Bognar just returned from two months in Baghdad, where he helped with the effort to rescue and rehabilitate the animals at the Baghdad Zoo. When he arrived, only 32 of the 600 animals remained, the rest were stolen or roaming the streets. The ones left at the zoo were suffering from neglect, malnutrition and dehydration. Bognar helped in the efforts to care for the animals, and to find the lost ones.
Film critic David Edelstein reviews Capturing the Friedmans, a new documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a family torn apart by charges of pedophilia and child molestation.
He was recently abducted and expelled from Zimbabwe by government authorities. He had been The Guardian's Zimbabwe correspondent, and was the last foreign journalist allowed to file from the country.
She was the founding executive director of the Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She's written for U.S. News and World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist and The New Yorker. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Her latest book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, is about a little-known religious text that was rediscovered in Egypt in 1945. She will explain why the Gospel of Thomas was suppressed by the church and kept out of the canon. Elaine Pagels has been called one of the world's most important writers and thinkers on religion and history. She won the National Book Award for her book, The Gnostic Gospels. Pagels is a professor at Princeton University.Enter Me
An expert on energy and the Middle East, he is a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Ibrahim was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and Tehran bureau chief. He also covered energy for The Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a book about oil and war.
Journalist Joyce Davis is deputy foreign editor at Knight Ridder newspapers and former Mideast editor at NPR. She's the author of Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East. Davis conducted interviews with Islamic scholars to try to understand the teachings about martyrdom and how those teachings had been twisted by extremists. She also conducted interviews in the Middle East with the families of both martyrs and victims.
Orizio is the author of the book Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators. He interviewed deposed dictators who have not apologized for their crimes and weren't rehabilitated. They were Uganda's Idi Amin, Haiti's "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Ethiopia's Mengistu and others. The interview is conducted by Fresh Air guest host Dave Davies.
Novelist David Benioff is the author of 25th Hour, about a drug dealer who has one day left on the outside before beginning his seven-year prison sentence. It's the basis of the Spike Lee film of the same name, starring Edward Norton.
Kaige is the director, writer, producer and acts in the new film Together, a coming-of-age tale about a 13-year-old Chinese boy who plays violin. The boy's father takes him from their provincial Chinese city to Beijing, seeking prominence. But plans change as the boy grows up and ultimately chooses his own path. Kaige is best known for his film Farewell My Concubine, which was nominated for an Oscar. His other films include Yellow Earth, The Big Parade and Killing Me Softly.
