Zitat des Tages von Stephen Sondheim:
I think 'lunch' is one of the funniest words in the world.
Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
I was raised to be charming, not sincere.
Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.
I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it.
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
If people have split views about your work, I think it's flattering. I'd rather have them feel something about it than dismiss it.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.
I would have been a geologist.
I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.
Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
A close-up on screen can say all a song can.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me.
I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
I'm a great audience. I cry very easily. I suspend disbelief in two seconds.
My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.