On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it's surprising which piece shows up.
— George C. Wolfe
I really don't find revivals very interesting because I like new work a lot. I feel like if you're going to pay me, then let me do what I do and let me try to solve some problems. Let me try to make something fly. Why would I do something that everybody has already done the hard work on? But that's me. Tons of people do revivals really well.
My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.
A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'
Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.
One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they're thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they've placed their characters in - to blow up that box so the journey can begin.
I think there's an aspect of my soul, of my personality, that's very suited to directing. I like being in the room with actors; I love creating a safe space and a chaotic space for the discovery to take place. I love creating a sense of community.
Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.
I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.
Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.
Always, when I do a play, there's got to be an equation of risks and potential failure. When you're working on a new play, it's like, 'How the hell do I do this, and do we have the time?' All of these huge questions engage, hopefully, the smartest part of me. And then when you're doing a revival, I went, 'Well, somebody's already solved it.'
Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.
The best of any artist is in their art.
When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, 'No.' There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing 'Spunk,' and the rules changed.
I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.
The black experience, which has nothing to do with my play 'Angels in America,' allowed me to understand the Mormon character. He was the character that couldn't come out to his mother. It allowed me to understand emotional and closeted behavior, because you're so acutely aware of how you're perceived.
If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.
Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.
'You Gotta Have Heart' is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.
To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.
1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.
Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you've created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn't necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you're looking for is in the room.
There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O'Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of 'The Iceman Cometh.'
All the things that can happen to an artist regardless of how prepared they are and how smart they are and hard-working they are and attractive - doesn't matter. There's always somebody cuter. There just is.
If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian.
I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.
A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
'Jelly,' more than any black musical before it, celebrated the majesty, the purity, the joy of so many artists who are unable to fully embody these same qualities in their own lives.
I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.
Broadway was very vital back in the '20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season.
Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.
I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.
I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.
You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.
My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.
Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.
The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.
Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.
Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.'
Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.
At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.
The worst thing when you're working is to say, 'I have a question,' and the other person goes, 'No! This is what it is.' That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating.
With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.
Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.
I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.
