 The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890? |
| Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure. |
| I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged. |
| Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. |
| 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. |
| Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father. |
| The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution. |
| In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies. |
| Gotta watch out for directors. |
| After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes. |
| Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten. |
| Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on. |
| 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. |
| Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other. |
| 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. |
| So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work. |
| I would have been a geologist. |
| 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. |
| There's something inimical about the camera and song. |
| Nice is different than good. |
