Audience

From his seat in a darkened theater, the 14-year-old boy told the performers and his fellow audience members something that had been bugging him for a long time. "Adults think that kids don't know when there's a problem, but we do," he said, after watching the debut production of Baltimore Performance Kitchen, the city's newest theater troupe. "We're not dumb," he said. "We know something is going on, even if you don't tell us. And if we don't know what is wrong, we're going to find out. " That was more than Satarah Cheeks could take.

The title character in "Richard III" qualifies as the most evil villain in any of Shakespeare's plays, which is no small accomplishment. This 15th-century English monarch killed so many members of his immediate family in his ruthless quest to ensure that nobody else sat on his throne that it's difficult to keep the bloody score. Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's muscular and mobile staging of "Richard III" places as much emphasis on Richard's violent deeds as on his equally volatile words.

Nearly 66 million voters watched Tuesday's town hall debate between President Barack Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney. While that audience is slightly down from the 67.2 million who saw the first debate, it is still a huge TV gathering -- up by 2.4 million viewers from the second debate in 2008 when Obama drew rock-star ratings every time he appeared on TV. The third and final debate will be held Monday with Bob Scieffer, of CBS News, as...

Baltimore viewers are tuning into the Orioles postseason play on TBS in big numbers, according to Nielsen Media figures for the first three games. An average audience of 370,783 Baltimore viewers watched the Orioles beat the Texas Rangers in a one-game wildcard showdown Friday. That audience Friday night peaked at 452,530 at 11:30 p.m. Meanwhile 348,442 viewers tuned in Sunday night in Game 1 of ALDS against the New York Yankees. That audience peaked at 394,996 at 11:15 p.m. Sunday.

Oscar-nominated actor John Travolta will sit down for a public conversation with John Waters at Baltimore's Maryland Institute College of Art . The man who created Edna Turnblad and the actor who brought the zaftig housewife of "Hairspray" to full-throated life on the big screen will be appearing together in Baltimore next month. Oscar-nominated actor John Travolta, whose film roles have included star turns in "Saturday Night Fever," "Grease," "Pulp Fiction" and the musical version of "Hairspray," will sit down for a public conversation with John Waters, the unregenerate bad-boy director responsible for "Hairspray" in the first place.

They looked like tonsils, or maybe they were pincers: the tessellated structures that curved to points above the members of Animal Collective. At the mouth of the stage at Merriweather Post Pavilion were two rows of cartoonish teeth and gums. So by the time the experimental band of Baltimore-area natives hit its stride at Tuesday night's show, a question had emerged: Was the imagery meant to suggest that Animal Collective was swallowing us or that we were consuming them? Was the band playing songs they thought we'd want to hear, or were we there to see them do whatever they pleased?

Gov. Martin O'Malley's schedule takes him to Denver on Wednesday, where he will be in the audience for first presidential debate. Maryland's governor has been one of President Barack Obama's top surrogates this season and will be on hand Wednesday night in the "spin rooms" to try and shape the post-debate news coverage. He'll also likely do some national interviews before the debate. O'Malley plans to leave for Colorado after the Board of Public Works Wednesday and return Thursday morning, according to a source close to the governor.

Baltimore's famous streaker Mark Harvey received a surprise shout-out from Ellen DeGeneres on Tuesday when she shared the Severn resident's antics with her audience. This isn't the first time DeGeneres has mentioned Harvey on her show. In April, after he streaked at Camden Yards on the Orioles' Opening Day, DeGeneres sent him a cape and underwear. "I thought that was the last I'd ever hear of him," DeGeneres told her audience. Then she showed a clip of Harvey running on the field at the Ravens game Sunday night donning the ensemble.

The sorry tableau of two replacement referees standing side by side in the end zone making opposite calls on a controversial play at the end of ESPN's "Monday Night Football" led to the largest audience on record for the post-game SportsCenter show. That image of those two hopeless referees making the opposite call on a contested reception will long serve as the symbol of what has happened to the game in this labor dispute between the real referees and owners. But the ratings for the games, compromised as they might be by utterly inept officiating, just keep going up. Sunday's contest between the Ravens and the New England Patriots was seen by 21.3 million viewers.