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When playwright Nilo Cruz won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play Anna in the Tropics, it became only the second play to win the honor without having staged it on Broadway. The play opens Wednesday night in Princeton, New Jersey -- a step closer to the Great White Way. Joel Rose of member station WHYY has a profile.

Actor John Ritter, whose portrayal of the bumbling bachelor Jack Tripper helped make the TV sitcom Three's Company a hit in the 1970s, dies at age 54 of a previously undetected heart problem. Ritter became ill Thursday while working on the set of his current show, 8 Simple Rules ... For Dating My Teenage Daughter. NPR's Melissa Block has a remembrance.

Leni Riefenstahl, renowned and despised for her depiction of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Triumph of the Will, dies at 101. Riefenstahl maintained she should be above criticism for the 1934 film, which has been called the best propaganda film ever made, but she spent more than half her life apologizing for it. NPR's Bob Edwards has a remembrance.

Jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves is among the few musicians still practicing the improvisational art of scat. In her new album, A Little Moonlight, the Grammy winner fearlessly takes on jazz standards and makes them her own. NPR's Michele Norris talks with Reeves.

Kurt Vonnegut

A Boston company that went bankrupt was getting ready to liquidate its artwork assets. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports a local organization of arts attorneys saved the artwork, and now the artists have 60 days to get it back.

The music playing as fashion models strut down the runway can be as important as the clothes they're wearing. As part of a Morning Edition series on the fashion industry, NPR's Neda Ulaby looks behind the scenes at the process of building the sound of a runway show.

Over a 50-year period, artist Laurent de Brunoff has worked on more than 30 books about the famous French elephant Babar and his family. The latest is Babar's Museum of Art, a richly drawn and playful look at the world's great works of art. He speaks with NPR's Robert Siegel.

John Lawton's Cold War spy novel, Old Flames, is set in England in l956, during Nikita Khrushchev's first visit to Great Britain. In this story, as Lawton makes clear, the spy is anything but a hero. Lawton speaks with NPR's Scott Simon.

The Handmaid's Tale, an opera based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, makes its North American debut at the Minnesota Opera in St. Paul. The opera tells of a world where religion is used to justify political agendas and women are stripped of their rights. Minnesota Public Radio's Marianne Combs reports.