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.
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
Art is craft, not inspiration.
Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn’t need music; lyrics do.
Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
The art of making art, is putting it together...
Into the woods you go again You have to every now and then Into the woods, no telling when Be ready for the journey Into the woods, each time you go There’s more to learn of what you know.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
My cage has many rooms.
I’ve always preferred actors who sing to singers who act in all the shows I’ve done.
Gotta watch out for directors.
The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
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.
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.
Music is structure out of Chaos.
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
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.
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.