You can't be theoretical when you're building a musical.
Sometimes good news is hard to absorb.
I was a youngish man entering fatherhood when we wrote 'Woods,' a patchwork of classic fairy tales with an original tale sewn in. I had dedicated my libretto to my baby daughter.
Something I like to do is watch someone else do their thing.
Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, 'Ohhh, it's magic.' Nothing's magic. A thing doesn't jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren't good.
The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it's there, you're stuck with it.
Most musicals are real crowd pleasers.
Some of the things I've done in my life, I've done to make money because I had to make money... and some things I did just because they were on my mind and they were of interest to me... some of the little plays I wrote.
I just don't really think of career. I've never been driven by career.
I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.
I think visually... so, even when I'm writing a play, I'm envisioning it.
In most audience-participation shows, the participant is so clearly not a part of what's going on that it's the fish-out-of-water aspect that makes it funny.
I don't do movie junket-y things, because I don't really do movies that much.
I've ended up working with Disney a lot, which is kind of peculiar. In theater, I've done a couple of projects with them and written a couple movies and whatnot.
I like the stage challenges of having somebody literally falling apart before your very eyes.
If you're like me and nosy, you're always eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
It so fascinates me how we always laugh when somebody falls on a banana peel, how comedy and injury are often so interwoven. I've always been a sucker for that.
I'm a hippie child of the '60s. What drives me crazy about mass media entertainment is that it's so often devoid of any ideas.
When you grow up, you don't realize that your parents are any different than anybody else's. And their behavior - you have nothing to compare it to. So that is what normal is, even if it's abnormal.
I'd like to just say that there's nothing darker than 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' and some of the early Disney stuff.
