Mark Blankenship

Each week, the guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: Ncuti Gatwa as the new Doctor, Florence + The Machine's new album, and more.

Billie Holiday will not be singing unless she "feels it." That's practically her thesis statement in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Lanie Robertson's play about a drug-ravaged nightclub show near the end of Holiday's tortured life. War stories and bawdy jokes are never a problem — and neither ...

Caissie Levy and Will Swenson were so used to playing lovers that they weren't sure how to play enemies.

They first got romantic in the 2009 revival of Hair, as the doomed couple Sheila and Berger. Then last year, they cast forbidden sparks as the adulterous leads in the rock ...

Whatever they are, our holiday traditions tend to be a mixture of the universal and the specific.

If we celebrate Christmas, for instance, we might have stockings and trees just like our neighbors, but we might also be the only ones in town who wear homemade elf hats while we ...

Monologist Mike Daisey has a new story to tell, and if you want to hear it, then you'd better settle in. It's going to take a month to get through it.

In one sense, All the Faces of the Moon, starting Sept. 5 at the Public Theater in New York, ...

Ike Schambelan doesn't like thinking about disability, and he's guessing you don't either.

"We hate it. We do not want to see it," he says. "Personally, I want to see it least in myself, second in my wife, third in my cat and fourth in you and all others. I ...

Mark Blankenship says that when 30 Rock unleashed a series of parodies of old TV shows, it showed a surprising amount of edge about prejudices that may persist.