For me it’s more fun to find an unexpected moment for a character to sing when you don’t expect them to.
Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.
I didn’t really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.
I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it’s all going to be neatly wound up at the end.
I liked my father a lot, but I didn’t see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.
Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.
With videotaping, on the second generation you’re already losing some of the freshness.
My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn’t know what to do with the kids.
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.
Pointillism takes emotional images, character, etc., and makes them all come together and make a whole that tells a story.
When I listen to my work, I think, what’s so inflammatory about it? It’s not really that dissonant. A lot of people who used to hate my stuff have come round to it.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
Sometimes I’ll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t.
You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can’t be too close.
You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
I took piano lessons when I was 6. I didn’t want to go on with it. I don’t remember being moved by a piece of music.
I was never much of a reader. I’m a slow reader, which is unusual, because I’m so into language and I love words so much. But it’s hard for me to read.
I’m sure many writers have these strange, tiny little habits.