Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn’t see my own father.
White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.
The difference between a cow and a bean is a bean can begin an adventure.
The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It’s a kind of public humiliation.
When you trance out properly, when you’re completely in that world, there is no other world, so there’s no conflict.
Almost all the shows I’ve been connected with have been extremely well cast. They’re playing the show, not just doing the songs.
Lemuel Ayers had had a huge success producing and designing Kiss Me, Kate. He wanted to produce this as a musical. I got the job. It was a professional score.
It’s pleasanter to work in the country, where you can wander out among the trees. But I don’t get as much work done. In the city you don’t want to leave the room because there’s all that chaos going on.
For anyone approaching any one of the cast albums, if they don’t like what they hear, it’s not the performer’s fault.
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.