Niece of larger-than-life movie director Cecil B. de Mille, Agnes had star quality of her own and talent to burn. Trained in England at the Ballet Rambert, de Mille returned to the United States to help form the American Ballet Theater, and served as both dancer and choreographer. Credited with intro

Ballet goes hollywood, Dramatic, Ebullient, Grand, Monumental, Sincere

Stephen Sondheim earned his musical stripes alongside the best in the business: his first foray into creating a musical was as lyricist to Leonard Bernstein's composer for "West Side Story" (1957). After a second lyrical outing with Jules Styne's music for "Gypsy" (1959), Sondheim was ready to brave

20th-century music, Bubblicious, Grand, New american musical, Rhythmic, Witty

Playwright, professor, and Performance artist Anna Deveare Smith grounds her avant-garde theater in the infinitely strange world of reality. "I look for the poem that the person is," Smith says of the real-people inspirations for her dramatic characters. Instead of creating intricate backgrounds for

Collage, Huge, Layered, Open-ended, Political, Polychromatic, Sincere, Social protest, Solo performance

Enigmatic, magnetic, elusive, and mysterious -- these words and others like them have been employed over the decades to describe actor/playwright Sam Shepard's cryptic persona and plays. After leaving a dead-end town in the middle of a California wasteland, a young Shepard moved to America's biggest

Dystopic, Melancholy, Off-broadway, Primal, Tense, Visceral