Search results for

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. In this segment: Jackie Mason. His comic roots are planted firmly in the Borscht Belt, but he's conquered everything from HBO to Broadway. Rebroadcast from Sept. 29, 1987.

Haven't had your swash sufficiently buckled? Cap'n Jack's back — three hours' worth of him this time. But Pirates isn't light and clever anymore; it's bigger, noisier and all about effects.

Filmmaker and actor Christopher Guest, best known for This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman, picks TV and film comedies as well as violent and serious titles as well among his favorite DVDs to watch.

Sarah Polley's debut film is a generous, deceptively simple portrait, simply brought to life: Gordon Pinsent's Grant is gruff and bearish, Julie Christie's Fiona gorgeous and exquisitely blank.

As artistic director of the Encores series at New York's City Center, Jack Viertel is the go-to guy for one of New York's hottest musical-theater tickets. Encores revives vintage Broadway musicals in limited runs, with minimal staging and actors reading from scripts. The latest Encores, Stairway to Paradise, stars Kristin Chenoweth in an homage to the musical revue; it runs May 10 to May 14. Viertel, who's also creative director for the Jujamcyn Theaters group, has been instrumental in bringing shows as diverse as M. Butterfly, Jelly's Last Jam, and The Producers to Broadway.

Comic Don Rickles is known for insulting his audiences on stage, but he doesn't consider himself an insult comic. His heyday was in the '50s and '60s, on TV and in Vegas. Frank Sinatra, an early fan, helped get him noticed. Now Rickles has written a memoir, Rickles' Book.

Sam Raimi spent a fortune, and its stars strive for naturalism, but Spider-Man 3 proves dramatically less than the sum of its expensive, ill-unified parts.

Pittsfield, Maine, is an unlikely place for world-class ballet, but then Col. Michael Wyly is not the guy you would expect to start a ballet company. The retired Marine commanding officer wanted to make his young daughter's dreams come true, so he lured retired Russian ballet star Andrei Bossov to rural Maine.

The son of a former priest and a one-time nun, John Fugelsang says he wasn't sure if he should have been born. He's turned funny stories from his life into a one-man show, All the Wrong Reasons. It's at the New York Theater Workshop until May 6.

In a new film about love and Alzheimer's, the disease that claimed her mother, the Oscar-winning actress co-stars as a hard-edged woman who has "kind of given up on life" — until she meets a man caught in a crisis of his own.