Quotes

My idea of heaven is not writing.

On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point. Static action - if that's not an oxymoron - is accepted. It's what writer Burt Shevelove used to call "savouring the moment". That's a very tricky business on film. It's fine if the songs are presentational, as in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style movie where you watch them for the fun of it, but not with storytelling songs. When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.

My mother had a lot of pretensions. One of them that she picked up from some of her tonier friends was 'luncheon' which always struck me as a screamingly funny word. 'I'm having a luncheon at 21' she would say. I think 'lunch' is one of the funniest words in the world. That's one of the reasons I used it.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of hearing my voice before, I tend to sing very loud, often off-pitch, and always write in keys that are just out of my range.

Oscar Hammerstein really believed that there was 'A bright golden haze in the meadow'. I never have.

I want people to enjoy what I write. I'm a product of Broadway, no matter how pretentious anybody thinks what I write is. I'm not writing for myself. I'm writing to entertain, to make people laugh and cry and think. I want as big an audience as possible.

[observation, 2014] How much effect does the theatre have on life? In the '20s, the theatre had an effect on public thinking. I think today, by the time a show gets onstage, the idea has already passed. Theatre is now a cottage industry and a cottage entertainment. It doesn't have much influence.

[on 'Assassins'] Every time I saw a reference to the show as singing, dancing assassins, it would just piss me off, pardon the expression. Sing they do, but when they dance they're not happy about it. Nobody at the end of the show should feel that we have been excusing or sentimentalizing these people. We're examining the system that causes these horrors. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't guarantee the happiness. That's the difference. These are people who feel they've been cheated of their happiness, each one in a different way.

Oscar Hammerstein had urged me to write from my own sensibility, but at that time I had no sensibility, no take on the world. My voice snuck up on me. I started to develop an attitude in 'Saturday Night,' a laconic lyrical style in 'Gypsy' and a structurally experimental musical one in 'Anyone Can Whistle.' They all came together in full-throated fruition in 'Company.' 'Oh,' I thought at the end of the opening number, 'that's who I am.' From then on I could afford to try anything, because I knew I had a home base that was mine alone and that would inform everything I would write, good and bad.

If you ask me to write a love song, I don't know what to write. But if you say, 'Write me a torch song about a girl who's just been jilted by a guy, and she comes into a bar and she's in a red dress and she orders a grasshopper,' that I can write, because you've started to characterize and give me specifics to write about - there's a drink to write about, there's a bar to write about, there's a dress to write about. Who was the guy who jilted her? Why did she choose that dress?

I suppose if there's one show that's closest to my heart, it would probably be 'Sunday in the Park With George,' because of the ambitiousness of what it's trying to say, and because I really feel, obviously, for the subject matter.

I liked theater, but I loved movies of every kind: dramas, comedies, short subjects and especially trailers - everything in fact except musicals, which with the exception of 'The Wizard of Oz' I either tolerated if I enjoyed the songs or was bored by if I didn't. My particular favorites were romantic melodramas and suspense pieces like 'Casablanca' and the Hitchcock movies of the period, movies in which the music was as important to the storytelling as the actors were.

I had a lot of trouble with my mother, getting along with her, and she- she didn't really want a child. But she was very much in love I think, with my father, and even obsessed with him. So when he left her, which he did, for another woman, the wrath of God had nothing on her, and she, unfortunately, tried to make me pay for the sins of my father, and so it was not a very good relationship. And if it hadn't been for the Hammersteins, I really don't know where I would be, or if I'd even be alive.

[on the song 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' from 'Gypsy'] The difficulty was to find a way to say 'Things are going to be better than ever' without being flatly colloquial on the one hand or fancifully imagistic on the other. I was proud of the solution, and especially so when I picked up the New York Times one morning in 1968 and read the first sentence in the leading editorial: 'Everything is not coming up roses in Vietnam.' I had passed a phrase into the English language.

[on Rap and Lin Manuel-Miranda] Of all the forms of contemporary pop music, rap is the closest to traditional musical theater, both in its vamp-heavy rhythmic drive and in its verbal playfulness. I imitated it in the opening number of 'Into the Woods.' But I was never able to find another appropriate use for the technique, or perhaps I didn't have the imagination to. Miranda does. Rap is a natural language for him and he is a master of the form, but enough of a traditionalist to know the way he can utilize its theatrical potential. This strikes me as a classic example of the way art moves forward: the blending of two conventional styles into something wholly original, like the marriage of Impressionism and Japanese prints in the late 19th century. It's one pathway to the future.

The sad truth is that musicals are the only public art form reviewed mostly by ignoramuses. Books are reviewed by writers, the visual arts by disappointed, if knowledgeable, painters and art students, concert music by composers and would-be composers. Plays, at least in this country, are reviewed by people who don't know de Montherlant from de Ghelderode and couldn't care less, whose knowledge is comprised of what they read in Variety and gossip columns, and who know nothing, of course, about music. Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publicly criticized by illiterates.

[on his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein] Just before he died, he gave me a picture of himself and I asked him to inscribe it, which is sort of odd because he was a surrogate father to me, it's like asking your father to inscribe a picture. And he thought for a minute, and he was clearly a little embarrassed. And then he got a smile on his face, like the cat had just eaten the cream. And he wrote something. And when he left the room, I looked at it. And it said 'For Stevey, my friend and teacher.' That's a measure of Oscar. He wrote a lyric, as a matter of fact, in 'The King and I' - by your pupils you are taught. He was a remarkable fellow.

[on the labeling of 'Sweeney Todd' as an opera or a musical] 'Dark operetta' is the closest I can come, but that's as much a misnomer as any of the others. What 'Sweeney Todd' really is is a movie for the stage.

[on Oscar Hammerstein II] Oscar was able to write about dreams and grass and stars because he believed in them.

The only reason to write is from love. You must not write because you think it's going to be a hit, because it's expedient, or anything like that. It's so difficult to write, it's so difficult to put on a show, you better - if you have the privilege of being able to write it, you write it out of passion. That's what failure taught me.

Happily, schools still persist in putting on plays. Performing live theater still seems to be fun for young people. Nevertheless, rock concerts are their theater of choice, and even that territory is succumbing in popularity to more passive forms: movies, television and the internet. I used to think that the need for live theater would never die; I fear I was wrong.

Awards have three things to offer: cash, confidence, and bric-a-brac. A few offer all three, but even though some of the bric-a-brac is handsome indeed, the only awards that have significant value are the ones that come with cash.

To be part of a collaboration is to be part of a family, and for me - the only child of constantly working and mostly absent parents, a kid who grew up without any sense of family - every new show provides me with one. It may be a temporary family, but it always gives me a solid sense of belonging to something outside of myself.

The most valuable asset a theater songwriter can have, apart from talent, is a good book writer. In fact, with a good book writer, the songwriter doesn't need much talent, as has been proven more than once.

[asked why he went into musical theater] It was very simple. When I was 11 years old, I met Oscar Hammerstein and he became a surrogate father and I just wanted to do what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, so I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I'd've become a geologist.

Art is work and not inspiration... invention comes with craft.

[on "Sweeney Todd"] Hal always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was about scaring people.

I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice. If you're broken-field running, they can't hit you with so many tomatoes.