The great Modernist composer Benjamin Britten was born in Suffolk in 1913. He studied privately with composer Frank Bridge and later went to school at the Royal College of Music in London. Although he picked up technique effortlessly and gleaned a great deal of knowledge by following the examples of

20th-century music, Eclectic, Epic, Monumental, Queer

Sex, melodrama, and a raunchy, dark comedy -- audiences can expect to find excesses of all these types in the works of Pedro Almodovar, a Spanish filmmaker whose homegrown popularity rivals that of Luis Bunuel. Born poor and unable to afford tuition to film school (all of which were, at any rate, clo

Absurd, Candy, Cartoonish, Ebullient, Grotesque, Kinetic, Overflowing, Playful, Polychromatic, Pop, Queer, Sexy, Spanish film

Growing up white, Jewish, and homosexual in the turbulent South of the '60s does not lay the groundwork for a complacent life. Finding himself a one-man experiment in the limits of tolerance, Kushner has used theater to explore issues of prejudice and community. His plays shed special light on the po

Contemporary plays, Epic, Ethereal, Expansive, Funny, Gay/lesbian theater, Political, Queer, Sprawling

Todd Haynes' biography reads as if he were an unlikely mix between Cheech Marin, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Quentin Crisp. Haynes was born in Los Angeles and educated at Brown University, where he was awarded an honors degree in Art and Semiotics in 1985. He is also the first -- and possibly only -- ar

Anxiety, Funny, Neurotic, Queer