David Alan Grier’s ‘Sporting Life’ On Broadway: The stand-up comedian and star of In Living Color was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Sporting Life in the opera Porgy and Bess. “I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party,” he says.

Sacha Baron Cohen: The Fresh Air Interview: Actor and writer Sacha Baron Cohen is famous for taking his characters — Ali G., Borat, Bruno — into the real world, interacting with people who have no idea that they’re dealing with a fictional character. But his new movie, The Dictator, is a scripted comedy about a tyrant on the loose in New York.

You can hear the original broadcasts here:

David Alan Grier’s ‘Sporting Life’ On Broadway

Sacha Baron Cohen: The Fresh Air Interview

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Oldham sings mostly sad songs, with a truly tragic song thrown in every now and again for good measure. And we were thinking: Who’s the singer he’s least like? We settled on Doris Day. We’ll ask Oldham three questions about the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced singer of the ’50s and ’60s. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The show, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, has just been released in its entirety as a DVD box set, which presents the entire run on 24 discs. George Maharis, who starred on Route 66 with Martin Milner, talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about all that travel.

“We never saw the schedule,” Maharis says. “It was week-to-week. We didn’t know where we were going and sometimes we wouldn’t know what the script was until two days before shooting.” In fact, sometimes, it might take a little longer than that to actually get the scripts, since they were sometimes in a city where they wanted to shoot more than one episode, but not all the scripts were done yet. “I remember we were in Cleveland doing the one with Nehemiah Persoff about the Russian Hill, and we were standing on the bridge, and we had no pages — we didn’t know where to go yet. Luckily, they had to raise and lower the bridge, and in the meantime, the plane landed in Cleveland, and a car took the script and brought it to us, because we didn’t know what clothes we were supposed to be in.”

Getting to visit all those places was very much in line, Siegel points out, with the fact that at the time, the drive around the country was a common aspiration; something a lot of people wanted to try. “I can’t tell you how many people wrote to me and told me that’s what they wanted to do after seeing the show,” Maharis agrees. “And they wanted to buy a car and toot around.”

It wasn’t just a show that tooted around, though. It was also one that featured a startling number of people who later became serious movie or TV stars, including Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Suzanne Pleshette, William Shatner, Tuesday Weld, Leslie Nielsen, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Ed Asner and Alan Alda.

Oh, and Lee Marvin, about whom Maharis says, “I remember. I went and pushed him off the fence.” In fact, you’ll find that Maharis can still identify just about any Route 66 clip you want to lay on him, including the one where Robert Duvall plays a drug addict. It’s called “Birdcage On My Foot,” and if you want to see it, it’s right there on the box set. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

This is where impeccably dressed young people hold up handmade signs for hours on end, asking or bartering for screening tickets. Sample trades offered include hugs, made-to-order poetry and back flips — though no one has been more convincing than the girl seeking tickets for Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love by cooing the Ella Fitzgerald standard of the same name.

I was skeptical about this ticket-seeking approach — I have enough trouble getting into screenings as accredited press — but the seekers I spoke to said it’s more effective than you’d expect. People in the movie business get plenty of free tickets, but being in the movie business often makes them too busy to watch movies.

And sure, there are ulterior motives involved in this waiting game — it’s impossible not to be surrounded by tall drinks of water in Dior while ticket-hunting, and someone has to comfort them when they miss out on that new Cronenberg movie. But who cares? It’s the promise, if not the practice, of movie-watching that’s bringing people together — and isn’t that what film festivals are all about?

I’ll refrain from joining in the annual Cannes tradition where critics confidently set odds on awards winners and are proven completely wrong; the random nature of the Cannes jury (sample members this year include Ewan McGregor and fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) makes guessing Cannes awards way more of a crapshoot than your average awards predictions.

But here, to recap the fest, are a few distinctions of my own creation:

Weirdest Movie-To-Movie Conversation: There were giggles in the theater when a doomed Wall Streeter (Robert Pattinson) in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis asked his driver, “Where do these limos go at night?” That question had been memorably answered a few days before, in a scene in Holy Motors where a set of anthropomorphic limos do a kind of Waltons routine and wish each other good night.

The films are unlikely companion pieces in other ways, as well: Both are absurdity-tinged limo journeys into the night toward madness. Cronenberg’s film follows a finance whiz kid who’s confined to his limo by New York traffic and an Occupy-flavored protest movement with a fondness for pelting the wealthy with dead rats.

It’s an odd cinematic construction consisting mostly of recited monologues from Don DeLillo’s source novel, reflecting on capitalism at its most dystopian. You’re as flooded with ideas and data as these currency traders at their blinking touch screens, but Cronenberg amps up the tension with shocking imagery and smart staging; a final 20-minute confrontation between Robert Pattinson’s lead and a downtrodden wannabe assassin (Paul Giamatti) is a particular barnstormer.

And it helps that the film contains the festival’s Most Unexpected Great Performance from Pattinson. He’s appropriately icy and reptilian, but he’s not without an odd persuasive charm; when I say that the character functions like Gordon Gekko crossed with a more literal kind of bloodsucker, I mean it as praise.

Best Between-Screening Meal: It might sound awful to have to eat food-cart hot dogs and crepes all the time while dashing between festival screenings — a decent sit-down meal starts at around 15 euros, assuming you can find a table anywhere. But when even the lowliest-seeming stands offer spicy merguez sausages in freshly baked baguettes, alongside crepes spiked with a bit of Grand Marnier, it becomes very hard to complain.

Scene That Best Represents The Experience Of Watching The Movie Around It: the part in Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy where Nicole Kidman attempts to save Zac Efron from a jellyfish-sting reaction by urinating on his face. The less said about this one, the better.

Most Surprising Use Of Surprise Tactics: I won’t spoil how Abbas Kiarostami gets the audience to jump in his new film Like Someone in Love, but the fact that the famously cerebral, meditative Iranian director (behind films like Certified Copy) even tries is an event.

The movie opens with a girl (Rin Takanashi) on the phone in a Tokyo bar, attempting to convince her boyfriend she’s somewhere she isn’t. It’s the first of many deceptions and mistaken identities in this fascinating puzzle-box of a film.

She’s a college student with a sideline as a call girl, hired for the night by an elderly man (Tadashi Okuno), although he doesn’t seem to have any interest in sex once she gets there. He drives her home the next day, and they run into her boyfriend (Ryo Kase), who assumes the man is her grandfather; no one corrects him. The result is an alternately funny and bizarre story about generation gaps, the survival of the fittest, and the kinds of performances that are a part of love — that “like” in the title is key.

It’s almost impossible to figure out where this gorgeously shot film is going from scene to scene, and though the pace is stately, the result is still exhilarating. You come out of the theater flush with the joy of having seen something that’s not quite like anything you’ve found before. It’s the kind of feeling you always hope for when you come to a place like Cannes. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Growing up, I had pretty much the same interests as any other early 80′s kid: I loved the Muppets and Schoolhouse Rock and I was obsessed with mutually assured nuclear destruction.

In those Cold War days, apocalypse was in the air, from Sting crooning that he hoped the Russians loved their children too, to a made-for-TV spectacle called The Day After, which branded the image of a mushroom cloud into my 12-year-old brain, and inspired me to craft my own survival plan. When the time came, and war seemed imminent, I would hop a plane with my family and head to Australia. There, on that isolated island continent far-removed from the U.S. and the USSR, I would live happily ever after.

Then, one day while browsing the shelves of my middle school library, I picked up On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. A title like that could have inferred young love or a summer idyll.

This was not that book.

Carried by taut, no-nonsense prose, I entered a post-WWIII world, in which nuclear blasts have already eradicated life from the earth’s northern hemisphere. The planet’s only remaining habitable places are parts of Africa, South America, New Zealand and … you guessed it, Australia.

Being old enough to know what catastrophe was, but still young enough to think that it made exceptions, I had that almost inborn childhood instinct that the larger rules of the world — death, war, sickness — applied to everyone but myself. Now, my survival plan had been vindicated in print, and everything I had ever thought about my own exceptionalism had been proven true!

Then I got to page 10.

As it turns out, most of On the Beach is taken up by the people of Australia waiting to die. The radioactive fall-out clouds are drifting ever southward and there’s nothing anyone can do but track their inexorable progress. Peter Holmes, a newlywed with a young wife and baby daughter, is assigned to one of the world’s last remaining submarines, which travels north to investigate the source of a faint radio signal in the hopes of making contact with whoever is sending it.

There is no happy ending. The submarine mission only confirms the thoroughness of the devastation, leaving everyone in Australia — including Peter and his young family — with no option but to try to find small ways to enjoy their remaining time together before succumbing to agonizing radiation sickness or opting out quickly and painlessly with free suicide pills supplied by the government. The only small solace the book offers is that it is possible to face the end with our humanity intact.

By the end of On the Beach, I had come to the sobering realization that nuclear war makes no exceptions, not even for young girls.

I’m grateful to have read On the Beach when I did. At some point, we’re all forced to confront how complicated and heartbreaking life can be, and how often it defies the best-made plans. I can think of no gentler way to have been introduced to that lesson.

PG-13 is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

But sometimes, I love a musical that makes me come to it. Instead of singing in my face, a show like that whispers in my ear, giving me a private message to consider on the way home.

And February House is whispering right now at the Public Theater. Strange and dense and heartbreaking, it will never address an audience of millions, but it has lovely things to say.

The subject is an irresistible bit of history: In 1940, fiction editor George Davis invited fellow artists to live with him in a communal house in Brooklyn. His flatmates included the author Carson McCullers, the composer Benjamin Britten, the poet W.H. Auden, and even the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Just imagine a typical day in that house: All those brilliant people trying to manage their talent, but also trying to pay the telephone bill and make coffee before noon.

For February House composer Gabriel Kahane and book writer Seth Bockley, the commune is an experiment in making a family. In one way or another, all the characters hope the house — and the group — can solve their problems. Auden (Erik Lochtefeld) wants Brooklyn to be a paradise where he and his twentysomething lover Chester (A.J. Shively) can avoid the problems of insecure age and reckless youth. Carson (Kristen Sieh) wants to trade her abusive marriage for a liberated life of booze and sexual freedom. And George, poor George (Julian Fleisher), wants to be everyone’s mother and father. He wants this ad hoc dormitory to replace his loneliness and sense of failure.

The musical’s towering achievement is how carefully it draws each character’s desires. Bockley’s elegant, allusion-packed script suggests a hundred echoes for every action, hinting at motives and histories that we can understand without literal explanations. It’s obvious, for instance, that George has special affection for Carson, that he sees her as a wounded, inspiring bird who needs protection. But there’s never a grand speech where George declares his loyalty. We just glean it from the way he brings her food, the way he jumps to her defense, and the way he falters when she leaves the nest.

Working with director Davis McCallum, the cast creates even more nuance. I was especially impressed by Kacie Sheik as Gypsy Rose Lee, because it would have been easy to turn the world’s most famous stripper into a blowsy caricature. Instead, Sheik makes it clear that Gypsy’s not brassy: She’s just comfortable in her body. While her roommates flit around like nervous animals, she flops on the floor, hacking away at a detective novel and laughing without wondering if people can hear. Her ease underscores the house’s sadness, and it invites fascinating speculation about what she’s doing there.

As much as anyone, though, Kahane gives these people voices. In his score, every character has a distinct musical language that bubbles up in solos and creates sonic conversation in group numbers. Carson’s banjo songs are full of plaintive melodies and elegant metaphors, like Suzanne Vega writing before the war, while Auden’s devastating ballads recall art songs, defining his bruised heart with lush arrangements. Yet despite all these styles, the score coheres. Kahane blends genres when he needs to, so everyone sounds at home in the house.

Granted, the endless attention to detail can make the show feel aimless. The first act, which runs about ninety minutes, has fewer dramatic events than elegant bouts of character development, but when the world is so rich, it’s hard to complain.

Or at least, it’s hard for me. Some of my friends disliked the show’s meandering structure, but I’d say the journey pays off in the second act, when several characters make bold choices. Because we’ve spent so long getting to know them, we understand the full impact of their actions.

Cumulatively, then, this rich, slow-burning show carries remarkable weight. When it ended, I felt the loss I sometimes feel at the end of a novel, when I don’t want an imaginary world to disappear. It might be desperate and lonely and full of regret, but I still want to keep on living there.

Mark Blankenship edits TDF Stages, the magazine of Theatre Development Fund. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

I was at a garage sale with my grandmother when I found a paperback copy of Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.

I was, without much enthusiasm, rummaging through a pile of books. And then I turned over a small paperback. There, on the back, was a reviewer praising this “account of what it’s like growing up lesbian…” I flinched — such a private word to place in such prominence on a book cover.

I scanned the rest of the blurb, and then I saw it: “women who love women.” Now I had to have it.

I couldn’t possibly ask my grandmother to buy it for me, because then she’d know this thing about me that I wasn’t even sure I knew about myself. But I had to read it. So I stole it, and I read it in secret gulps sneaking pages when I could.

The thing is: I wanted too much from Rubyfruit Jungle and its narrator, Molly Bolt. What I really wanted wasn’t a novel at all, it was a “how to be a girl who likes girls even if you’re from a small town in the middle of nowhere” manual, and that’s just not what the book is.

Poor, provincial, and made aware early-on of her status as a “bastard,” Molly outmaneuvers the judgments of her teachers and her family, simply through her own intelligence and determination (neither of which I had in junior high). She conquers grammar school, then high school, even wooing the head cheerleader, all the while showcasing her unique blend of wit and beauty (did I mentioned that she’s gorgeous, too).

Sure, she’s kicked out of college when the (closeted) Dean of Students discovers her romantic relationship with her roommate. Sure she ends up sleeping in a car on the streets of Manhattan, only $24.61 to her name. But you never really believe she’s in trouble. She’s too much the hero. If she was to be my model of lesbianism, I reasoned, I might as well give up now.

There was just so much that I didn’t understand in the novel, references to structuralism and Susan Sontag, a discussion of butch femme dynamics. I needed the Cliffs Notes, or better yet, a teacher to give me context.

But I had no such teacher, and I was too far in the closet then to go looking for one, so instead I read the book in secret, in shame, sneaking looks at the sexy bits.

Those bits were what kept me coming back. Their frankness was alarming, but I knew that I was reading about women being intimate together, and that in at least some of those scenes there was great joy and no shame. So I read them until I didn’t feel shamed by reading them, and for right then, at that age, that was more than enough.

What I know now that I couldn’t have understood then is that Rubyfruit Jungle was important because of the countless ways it confused, frustrated, and unsettled me.

This novel made me conceptualize just how many ways of being were available for a girl-who-liked-girls — beyond my family, beyond my town. Eventually realized I didn’t need to be Molly Bolt. What I could be, instead, was someone who understood her world — someone who understood her choices and actions.

And this is the novel that started me on my way to that place.

PG-13 is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The movie is a Platonic romance set on an island off the coast of New England, the story of a 12-year-old girl and boy who merge their imaginative worlds. In an overture, the camera pans left to right past a series of stylized rooms in the beach house of the girl, Suzy, played by Kara Hayward. The camera lingers on an impressionistic needlepoint of a similar house — and a short time later when Suzy stares through binoculars out a window, it zooms out to show she’s inside the house in that needlepoint. Pretty cool, huh? So the whole movie is, like, this big, self-referential art object.

You could even interpret the action as unfolding in the mind of its feverishly creative boy protagonist, Sam, played by Jared Gilman, a bespectacled orphan on a scout trip with boys who relentlessly bully him. At the start of the film, Sam has escaped from the camp, leaving the hapless but sweet scoutmaster played by Edward Norton to exclaim, “Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop!” Soon it’s clear that Sam and Suzy are making their way toward each other across the island — with the party-pooper grown-ups in pursuit.

As in Anderson’s other films, these are parents who can’t parent. Sam’s foster father tells the sheriff, played by Bruce Willis, that when he finds Sam he doesn’t want him back. Suzy’s parents are present but still absent. She spies her mother, played by Frances McDormand, meeting in secret with Willis’s sheriff while her father, played by Bill Murray, is off somewhere in his own world. When Suzy and Sam meet, she tells him she wishes she were an orphan, too, like the heroes in her magical storybooks. Sam brushes her off, saying he loves her but doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He wouldn’t wish his orphaned existence on anyone.

The script of Moonrise Kingdom was co-written with Roman Coppola and is nearly as stylized as the movie’s look, full of absurdist curlicues delivered deadpan. I wish that Moonrise Kingdom were as much of a showcase for the performers as it is for the cinematographer and designers, but this is stand-in-your-place-and-say-your-lines acting, the stars essentially donating their likable selves for a higher cause — although Bill Murray has a few affecting moments when his character is in the throes of self-pity. The kid stars in their film debuts are fine — Jared Gilman behind glasses that take up almost half his face, Kara Hayward behind eyes onto which her character has glopped on a load of mascara.

Moonrise Kingdom carries a prominent dedication to Anderson’s girlfriend, writer Juman Malouf, and it feels like a wedding present from one artistic soul to another. It’s a deeply heartfelt work, yet unlike Anderson’s fans at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was never carried away by it — it kept me at arm’s length, more bemused than exhilarated. At several points, the soundtrack features a recording of Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” in which the instruments are presented together and singly. I’m guessing it’s there because Anderson wants us to know how much he loves taking things apart and re-arranging them, that what seems to some people — like me — fussy, even twee, is to others exquisite and moving. Moonrise Kingdom will divide people the way Anderson’s other films, do. But we can all agree that it’s an object of beauty. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

There’s an obvious fit between the visual circuses Luhrmann has put on in films including Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet and the ultra-stylish world of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. It makes sense that he would be drawn to the opportunity to adapt a book about lavish parties, and the parties in the trailer do indeed look pretty lavish. Mission accomplished!

There’s some gorgeous stuff here: the dive into the pool, the glimpse of a bespectacled face that brings to mind both elements of the book and the iconic imagery on the cover, and of course, the yellow car. (I read this book a long, long time ago, and even I remember that.)

What do you think? Oscar contender? Legendary flop? Beautiful but terrifying? Or did you, like me, mostly think, “Wow, it’s been a while since I watched Tobey Maguire in anything where he wasn’t Spider-Man”?

And most of all, WHERE IS THE 3-D LITTLE WOMEN? (Kidding.) (Mostly.) [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Now, when you talk finales, you invariably give away how shows ended, so be advised that we talk about — or at least mention in passing — the finales of the following things: Six Feet Under, Star Trek: The Next Generation, MASH, Calvin And Hobbes (bonus information: I teared up quietly and secretly when Stephen described the last panel!), Barney Miller, Who’s The Boss?, Growing Pains, Little House On The Prairie, Friends, Seinfeld (look, it’s Stephen’s interview with Larry David!), Newhart, St. Elsewhere, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, ER, Benson (which Stephen remembered accurately) and — inevitably — Lost. (Which I wrote about when it happened.) We also talk about Tales Of The City, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and Superman. Many things! And Turandot! And Kristen Wiig!

And yes, Community and Dan Harmon come up in this discussion, but only briefly.

After that, it’s on to summertime, and the fact that this is the time of year when we take road trips. We talk about what to listen to, how to entertain yourself, why you “don’t punch the driver”), and how to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. Recommended music includes Biohazard (kind of), Andrew WK’s I Get Wet, Japandroid’s Celebration Rock (not yet out), and Mahler’s Second Symphony. Oh, and episodes of Loveline. You’ll learn along the way what happens when Trey has the gall to suggest the most radical activity of all.

Of course, we close with what’s making us happy this week, because that’s what we do. (And if you haven’t looked at the photo of the pottery I made on vacation that everyone made fun of me about last week, LOOK UPON IT.) Glen recommends a comedy podcast (are you shocked?) called My Brother, My Brother And Me. Trey is happy about “a 300-year-old play that is a gigantic hit in at least three cities.” And Stephen once again serves up the First Listens at NPR Music. As for me, I violate the Zaxxon rule, and if you don’t know what that is, it refers to the time Stephen was really happy about his new Zaxxon machine. I’m sorry! Rules are made to be broken. You can, though, make your own corn dog mini-muffins.

Naturally, you can find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me,Trey, Stephen, Glen and Mike.

And by all means, sign up to get Pop Culture Happy Hour sent directly to you every Friday. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]