The old joke was Mitch Leigh, land baron, barren land.
My advice to singers is always the same: 'Don't sing the song, sing the lyric.'
One doesn't go on television for the Manhattan crowd. You buy the sides of buses for that.
New York is really the cheapest ad market. When I go on TV, I'm hitting a country. The market is as big as some countries, you know.
There's more musical freedom on Madison Avenue than anywhere else. It's an Eden for a composer.
When you think of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he's also a composer. And when you think of Mitch Leigh as a composer, remember he's also a businessman.
I think if you see that no one is going to laugh at you for it, I think the concept of living nicely will be infectious. I believe there is room for the absence of cynicism.
When I left Yale, I was prepared to write anything.
I'll write anything; I don't want to judge its form.
If you're not a nice person, don't call.
If I do what I really want to do, I'm not going to do a typical commercial Broadway show, so I'm going to write what I want to write.
You have to do what is real and what is right and what is good and what you believe in. It doesn't mean it's always going to work. It doesn't. But when it does, it is truthful and forever.
'La Mancha' was a gift from me to me. I never thought for a minute it was going to be a hit.
If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with 'Man of La Mancha.'
To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.
I grew up in Brownsville; most of the kids I grew up with went to jail, not Yale. If they had heard of Yale, they thought it was a lock to pick.
It's still word of mouth that is going to make or break a show, and while critics can't help a show, they can hurt it.
You can't make money on advertising; you just have to seed the clouds. What you're after is word of mouth.
Not exactly what the world was looking for, a musical on 'Don Quixote.' It was required reading in high school.
I applied to Yale, and I got in.
