Each week, the guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: Andor, Aftersun, Southern Baptist Sissies and more.

NPR broke the news about artistic director Nataki Garrett hiring a private security detail for her personal safety.

The historically Black Penumbra Theatre has received millions in grants to remake itself into a center for racial healing. What will its choices reveal about regional theater's future?

Subscriptions and ticket sales are down, but theater is needed more than ever. What theaters are doing to survive.

This production uses a cast of multi-racial actors who are female, nonbinary and trans — people who weren't even considered in the Declaration of Independence.

Each week, the guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: the film Gamak Ghar, Rosalía's album Motomami, remembering Angela Lansbury, and more.

Lansbury's acting career extended over an extraordinary seven decades. She says she knew early on that she'd never be "groomed to be a glamorous movie star" and thus sought out nontraditional roles.

Chances are the next Broadway hit will have originated at a regional theater taking a risk on an untested playwright. But once those playwrights are established, many of them start writing for TV.

Kalfin co-founded the Chelsea Theater Center, which was known for provocative off-Broadway shows.

The hours are long and the pay isn't great. But one theater in Baltimore is trying to rethink its labor practices to make theater a better workplace.

Fuller often explored and exposed how social institutions can perpetuate racism, like he did in his best-known work, the searing and acclaimed "A Soldier's Play."

After two years of pandemic closures, audiences are back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to find a season of diverse plays. But for many, change has come too soon.

This year, for the first time, Macon Pride features a bit of theater, a performance of "Friend of the Groom." It's the story of a wedding between a gay white man and a Japanese woman who needs to marry an American to stay in the U.S. What is supposed to be a small wedding turns into an elaborate event. Starring in this one man performance is Mark Mobley, a writer and director of marketing and communications at the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center. Mobley spoke with GPB's Peter Biello.

In the first of our six-part series, NPR's Bob Mondello explains how the theater that most Americans see is being transformed.

The musical — a fixture on Broadway since 1988, weathering recessions, war and cultural shifts — will play its final performance in New York on Feb. 18, 2023.