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.
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.