Credit Richard Bain / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
The Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, is the main venue for the town's annual Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The town lies on the Avon River — just like Shakespeare's British birthplace — and had schools named after Romeo and Juliet before the festival started in 1953.
Credit Brian Santa Maria / iStockphoto.com
This summer, NPR's Destination Art series is going off the beaten path to visit small to midsize North American cities that have cultivated lively arts scenes. We want to hear from you! Where's your favorite art hot spot? What makes it unique? Tell us about it.
Credit David Hou / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Cara Ricketts plays Innogen in Cymbeline, one of three Shakepeare plays produced for this year's festival.
Credit Peter Smith / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
For the first Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1953, a circus tent was brought from Chicago and raised on a hillside.
Credit Cylla von Tiedemann / Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Mike Shara (left) as Cornelius Hackl and Josh Epstein as Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker, a play Thornton Wilder rewrote into its current form 50 years ago in Stratford .
Most theaters let audiences know the show is about to start by blinking the lights. Stratford's Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, is a bit more festive. Four burgundy-uniformed buglers and a drummer quicken the pace of hundreds of theatergoers who've been ambling up the hill from the banks of the Avon River. When curtain time arrives, a cannon will boom.
There's always a line at the Boulangerie Cauvet on the corner of rue St. Charles in Paris's 15th district. In their family owned bakery, Esmeralda Cauvet and her husband Cyril sell around 800 croissants and 3,500 baguettes a day.
In the kitchen, head pastry maker Pierre Gibert still rolls his croissants from triangular strips of dough. "The key to a good croissant is good ingredients and a high quality dough. You have to knead it, let it rise and roll it a second time in butter. That's what gives a croissant its flaky quality," Gibert says.
The Mom and Dad's Record Collection series on All Things Considered continues with a memory of music and family from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and authorLeonard Pitts.
Pitts says his childhood mischief was set to the music of Nat King Cole, often courtesy of his mother's own voice. One afternoon, he remembers, she was singing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" while he played out back.
Militiaman from the Ansar Dine radical Islamic group ride on an armed vehicle between Gao and Kidal in northeastern Mali in June. Jihadists currently control the country's north.
Credit Habibou Kouyate / AFP/Getty Images
Mali's interim president, Dioncounda Traore, disembarks from a plane at Bamako airport last month. Traore returned to Bamako amid tight security following a two-month stay in Paris for medical treatment after being savagely beaten in the aftermath of the country's coup.
A rebellion in northern Mali, followed by a military coup in the south, has shattered the veneer of stability in a country that was hailed for 20 years as a model democracy in turbulent West Africa.
Now Mali is facing twin crises, prompting regional and international fears that the north — currently controlled by jihadists — is a terrorist safe haven. And the politicians who are meant to be fixing the problems are bickering.