A close-up on screen can say all a song can.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.
Almost all the shows I've been connected with have been extremely well cast. They're playing the show, not just doing the songs.
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
Company blends two traditional forms for the first time: the revue and the book show. It's a revue, but it tells a story.
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.
Everyone would like to be on Broadway, 'cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
For anyone approaching any one of the cast albums, if they don't like what they hear, it's not the performer's fault.
For me it's more fun to find an unexpected moment for a character to sing when you don't expect them to.
Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.
Gotta watch out for directors.
Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.
I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.
I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it.
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
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.
I haven't had a new show open on Broadway for over 10 years.
I learned was to be brave and not to expect that everything's going to come out perfectly.
I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.
I liked my father a lot, but I didn't see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.
I now have a house in Connecticut as well as a place in New York. So I have a studio in each place, and that's where I live my life.
I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.
I started listening to classical music when I was in my early teens. Prior to that, I listened to pop records or band records.
I took piano lessons when I was 6. I didn't want to go on with it. I don't remember being moved by a piece of music.
I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.
I was raised to be charming, not sincere.
I would have been a geologist.
I'm sure many writers have these strange, tiny little habits.
I's almost there, but not quite. We either get it up that further inch or give up.
I've always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I'm not particularly visual.
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.
If the fates are kind to us, there will be a movie of Sweeney Todd. It's a wonderful script.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.
In those days, it was 6 percent for book, music and lyrics. or the music and lyrics, it was 4 percent.
It's age. It's a diminution of energy and the worry that there are no new ideas. It's an increasing lack of confidence. I'm not the only one. I've checked with other people.
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.
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.
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.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
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.
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.
My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.
My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn't know what to do with the kids.
My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.
Nice is different than good.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
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.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
Oscar's creative imagination was far more sophisticated than the work itself, and has affected the theater permanently.
Oscar's lyrics don't read very well. They sing great. Whereas, if you read Cole Porter's, they're very entertaining.
Pointillism takes emotional images, character, etc., and makes them all come together and make a whole that tells a story.
Rodgers was famous for locking Larry Hart in rooms to get the lyrics.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
Sometimes colleagues in performance are absolutely astonishing.
Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story.
The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.
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?
The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me.
The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It's a kind of public humiliation.
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I had a very good right hand, but my left hand's terrible and I hated performing.
What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.
When I listen to my work, I think, what's so inflammatory about it? It's not really that dissonant. A lot of people who used to hate my stuff have come round to it.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
When you trance out properly, when you're completely in that world, there is no other world, so there's no conflict.
With the possible exception of Follies, I'd recommend the original cast wherever possible.
With videotaping, on the second generation you're already losing some of the freshness.
You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.
You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can't be too close.
You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
He shares his birthday with fellow musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.
He graduated from Williams College in 1952.
In 1983, Stephen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1990, Stephen was appointed the first Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University.
In 1997, he received the National Medal of Arts Award.
In 1973, he made his professional acting debut in a televised production of Kaufman's June Moon.
Oscar winning actress Katharine Hepburn used to be his next door neighbor and complained about his late night piano playing.
Stephen's favorite drink is Scotch.
Stephen is an inductee in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Stephen attended high school at the George School in Newton, PA.
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