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Catch a Fire sounds like an awfully familiar story. And, in some ways, it is. Movies on how South Africa suffered under apartheid, and the heroic efforts made to resist that repressive system, are hardly new. So it's tempting to write off this newest look at that era as too familiar and too late. That would be a mistake.

Charles Addams was the creator of the Addams Family — the warped and gruesome stars of magazine cartoons, a TV show and two movies. According to those who knew him, Addams was as strange as some of his characters.

A new multimedia opera looks at the life of the brilliant but troubled inventor Nikola Tesla. The director of the show, called Violet Fire, talks about the production, which is currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The sad-sack central character of Robert Ward's latest novel is the anti-hero of a darkly comic story of love and crime, who falls in love with a woman who knows a loser when she sees one. He sets out to win her affections with a heist gone bad...

Alan Cheuse reviews Half of a Yellow Sun, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel takes place during the Biafran War of the 1960s and follows characters through the turbulent times.

Bass baritone opera star Samuel Ramey has made a career out of playing demonic characters on stage. But he tells Scott Simon that in his early years he listened to the likes of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.

Greg Daniels and Mindy Kaling work on the hit NBC series The Office, starring Steve Carrell. Kaling also plays Kelly on the show. Daniels has a history of TV comedy writing. He has worked on Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld and The Simpsons. Kaling had a role in Carrell's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and appeared on an episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Little Children tracks an affair between a dissatisfied housewife and "the prom king," a stay-at-home dad who avoids studying for the Bar as he visits the playground with his son. Things come to a head when a man sent to jail for exposing himself to children is released and moves into the community.

In American fiction, TV and film, suburbia has long stood as shorthand for repression. It's a place of "wide lawns and narrow minds," as Earnest Hemingway put it. But representations of the suburbs have taken on a different shape of late.

Infamous tells the story of Truman Capote as he wrote In Cold Blood. If that sounds familiar, it's because a movie about the exact same thing came out a year ago, and it was a better film.

Fresh Air's book critic looks back at a busy year and selects the books that linger in memory as the calendar page turns. Her favorite fiction included Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires, and Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan.

Politicians aren't the only ones doing a song and dance this election season. Iowa-born playwright Robert John Ford has written a musical comedy that pokes fun at the Iowa Caucuses and there's an adaptation in the works for the New Hampshire Primary.