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News & Notes profiles a tap dance prodigy with a unique approach combining dance with music, a classical flute player and an athlete who's also a student leader.

Playwright David Henry Hwang's award-winning plays include 1980's FOB (or "Fresh Off the Boat") and M. Butterfly. For our series Scenes I Wish I'd Written, Hwang discusses an exchange from Tony Kushner's play Angels in America.

The latest work from the author of In the Company of Men premieres at New York's Lucille Lortel Theater. Neil LaBute's Fat Pig tells the story of a weight-challenged woman and a gutless executive who fall in love. Andrea Shea reports.

An enormous work of art opens Saturday in New York's Central Park. The Gates Project is the brainchild of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The husband-and-wife team's work consists of 7,500 squared arches topped with orange flags.

NPR's Bob Mondello reviews the performances of two actors who are expected to garner Oscar nominations for their performances: Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. Both actors give harrowing psychological portraits of outsiders — Bacon plays a former child molester in The Woodsman and Penn plays a down-and-out salesman in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Director Wes Anderson is known for offbeat, relatively low-budget films such as Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. His latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou starring Bill Murray, is a bigger film in the same vein. Reviewer Bob Mondello says the film may leave viewers feeling lost at sea, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Writer Jenny Bicks has been busy ever since she began working on Sex and the City in the show's first season. For our series Scenes I Wish I'd Written, Bicks chose to discuss a scene from a Woody Allen classic, Annie Hall. Hear NPR's Susan Stamberg.

Jan Berry, one half of the '60s musical duo Jan and Dean, dies at 62. William Jan Berry and Dean Torrence produced a string of gold records, including "Surf City" and "Little Old Lady from Pasadena." Berry spent nearly a year in a coma after a 1966 car accident. Hear NPR's Howard Berkes.

Patti Smith hit the 1970s music scene with an ecstatic blend of poetry and rock. She credits that signature sound to lessons in free-verse defiance from Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan.

NPR's Scott Simon speaks with playwright, director and Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins about his new play Embedded, currently on stage in New York. It's a parody that skewers the media coverage of the war in Iraq.