It's a humbling game. Even world-class experts who win far more than they lose have bad days.

Come the twilight of the year, the deathless "Nutcracker" begins its march across American stages, bearing tidings of comfort and joy.

When mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy and, let me tell you, mama ain't happy in "August: Osage County," the Pulitzer Prize-winning play coming to the Kennedy Center for a month-long run starting Tuesday.

A White House state dinner is an affair like no other because the sartorial demands are so precise, the politics both superficial and opaque and the entire display of pomp, circumstance and exclusivity precisely the kind of thing that goes against our national character. Of course, it is irresist...

It's safe to say that Eugene Lee wasn't intimidated by "The Fantasticks," the wee show etched in theatrical lore as the world's longest running musical. After all, the 70-year-old set designer had won Tony Awards for "Candide," "Sweeney Todd" and "Wicked" on Broadway. He was the original designer...

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee have eaten bugs together. They've shivered through frigid winter air, fought off desperately hungry cannibals and walked side by side on the empty and dusty roads of some future, dystopian America.

A numb fury resides at the heart of Rihanna's new album "Rated R" -- and it comes swelling to the surface almost instantly. During the opening verse of "Wait Your Turn," the embattled singer bellows her opening salvo: "I pitch with a grenade, swing away if you're feeling brave."

The term "contemporary art" no longer refers to the art of the moment. It refers to a certain kind of art, born in the late 1960s, that's got a particular look and feel and way of doing things attached to it -- every bit as much as "Renaissance" or "baroque" art do. Watercolors of boats at anchor...

Maine author Phillip Hoose said winning a National Book Award for his chronicle of a young civil rights pioneer was all the more moving because she took the stage with him when he accepted the honor.

"Acting" is a meager word for what Madeleine Carr and Rex Daugherty do in Solas Nua's "Disco Pigs." Carr and Daugherty tear through Enda Walsh's hour-long play as if the flames of hell were licking at their feet; they perform with Olympian endurance, and their intensity is practically criminal.

We knew there would be trouble right from the start when the rabbi said he would not perform our marriage on campus because the Columbia University chapel has "Christian windows."

Dear Carolyn: My younger sister, "Alexis," is a college sophomore, and in the past year or so has gotten very into drinking with her friends (she is underage). It started because she is in a small town and said there was "nothing else to do on the weekends."