The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.
— Harold Prince
Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.
When I was a 25-year-old kid, I raised $260,000 for my first show, 'The Pajama Game,' in such a homemade, pathetic, endearing way - a buck here, a buck there.
The truth of the matter is that I have lasted a long time, and with it comes both good and bad things. One of the good things is that no one can ever take my career away from me. No one can ever say, 'You can't be in the theater any more.'
One thing is certain: We can't go back. The musical will never be the same as it was.
There was never any question that I would go to college, that I would travel, that I would go to the theater early and often.
I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.
I think when you start analyzing trends and start making shows for a particular audience, you are making a fatal move. I think that's why people are doing too many revivals, that's why there's a plethora of rock musicals. There's room for everything, but not room for too much of anything.
Everything can't be a postage-stamp-sized project. Everything can't be a chamber piece. Musicals aren't even meant to be that, or identified with it... It's none of it simple.
It's fine when you careen off disasters and terrifyingly bad reviews and rejection and all that stuff when you're young; your resilience is just terrific.
I'm just really trying to say what I really mean, which is: 'Your eye's on the prize, your eye's on the future. It's nice to know that a lot of wonderful things have happened to your life and that so much of it has been successful. That's great, but the work is really what makes it fun - and that has to be the future.'
You do a show to be a hit and hopefully run a couple of years.
I'm always glad to see somebody rethink something rather than reproduce something I did.
When I started producing, it was George Abbott directing and he would let me do the scenery. He just wanted to know where the doors were - the entrances, the exits; the tables, the props - and then I would hire the designer. I took charge of the visuals - scenery and costumes and so on. And, the shows looked wonderful.
You can't just keep recycling revivals. And you can't keep betting on the efforts of guys like me who've been around. You have to take the next step and bet on the next generation.
I feel so much more comfortable when I'm working on material which makes other people scratch their heads and ask, 'You're going to make a musical out of that?'
I don't like abrasion while I'm working. I don't thrive on chaos. I enjoy what I'm doing, and it seems to work better when I am enjoying it.
I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?
We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.
I don't know why the guys with the big money don't find five terrific young producers and give each of them enough to commission a musical and to live on for a year. You'd be likely to get at least one project with a future.
'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.
Artistic self-indulgence is the mark of an amateur. The temptation to make scenes, to appear late, to call in sick, not to meet deadlines, not to be organized, is at heart a sign of your own insecurity and at worst the sign of an amateur.
Despite the successes, you remember the failures - rather lovingly.
It's nice to stay up nights worrying about the material, and not about the investors who gave you $10 million to do your musical.
I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.
Criticism is valuable... and self-congratulatory experiences are not.
I'm on a single track here - I work to direct what I want to see onstage. I basically have been feeding my own needs - to be working on a specific project at a specific time, and fortunately more often it works than fails.
I always had a good time in theatre, even when shows don't turn out as well as I'd like.
Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.
I don't compare shows. It's very simple. I don't live in the past. If there's any secret to my longevity, it's living in the future. And a little bit in the present.
I've seen a lot of 'Show Boats,' but I've never seen the one that thoroughly satisfies me.
The idea that I have to be on the same side of the fence as Dan Quayle is cruelly depressing to me, but the truth is, I believe in family values.
Most of the big money people don't know what would interest an audience if you did it. They only know what interested the audience last time.
I got successful awfully quick, and I wanted it... But I do think there is responsibility to move the musical theater form forward. I think you always have to be aware of the work that came before and build on that.
I really wish people - maybe it's naive - wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.
There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
I don't look back. I look forward and plan new shows. That's really feeding the most important part of working in the theater.
I didn't go into the theater to be a producer, I went into the theater to be a director.
I suppose a certain degree of adulthood has entered my life. Aiming for Broadway, I can't think that way any more. Of course, Broadway will always be important. But it's not the focus of everything that you do. You know, I'm very happy I was born when I was, so I got there in time. When it was time to get there.
I really like reaching out and seeing the audience - they're potential audiences! And on occasion I can make them excited about going to the theater again, if they've ceased or gone less.
I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater.
You could argue that 'Sweeney Todd' was romantic, if you looked closely at it, but it didn't impart that to its audiences. But it's large, and it's melodramatic, and it's a style I like to work in periodically.
The perfect expression of receiving a lifetime award is to be working when they're handing it out.
I remember when people actually wore coats and ties to theatre every night. They don't anymore. It's very different.
I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to.
Throwing money at something doesn't really create - forgive me that onerous word - art.
Audiences are quite happy to be astonished, and they don't care who does that astonishing.
I wouldn't be here if it weren't for 'Show Boat.' The kind of theater I chose to be involved in is completely a direct reflection of what 'Show Boat' made possible.
What's missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.
