Meryl Streep's really smart, and she's a film animal, and she knows that.
— James Lapine
I'd like to just say that there's nothing darker than 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' and some of the early Disney stuff.
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.
I like the stage challenges of having somebody literally falling apart before your very eyes.
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.
We live in an era of reinvention: Madonna and everybody desperately trying to change their persona.
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.
Most musicals are real crowd pleasers.
Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you're seeing them.
Sometimes good news is hard to absorb.
The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.
There are certain images that always haunt me.
When you're young, you envision happiness in such an idealized way.
I like to keep a low profile.
I'm drawn to dreams.
I did 'Impromptu,' which was a thrill and a horror all at once - my first movie and having to do it in Paris, and my wife wrote it, and I had some difficulties on the set, blah, blah, blah.
When you're trying out on Broadway, it's very hectic, and you're making changes night after night. There's a lot of pressures from producers to make some changes, and you're writing for actors who are in it - and sometimes the limitations of actors who are in it.
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 have nothing to hide.
I don't do movie junket-y things, because I don't really do movies that much.
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 just don't really think of career. I've never been driven by career.
The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it's there, you're stuck with it.
Something I like to do is watch someone else do their thing.
You can't be theoretical when you're building a musical.
I've grown more and more appreciative of good writing, and I now really hope I can become a better and better writer.
I need an audience to look at what I've done so I can understand it, so I can step back and watch them respond and figure out what they're understanding about what I'm trying to do and what they're confused about.
I love photography... I'd like to write a show about photography.
I'm a very laid-back person.
Fairy tales, which teach a moral lesson, are about ourselves. Myth deals with forces greater than ourselves.
I really enjoyed writing the adaptation of 'Into The Woods.' I thought it was wonderful to not be the director, frankly. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
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.
If you're like me and nosy, you're always eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.
I am thrilled to receive the Sondheim Award from the wonderful Signature Theatre. I have already received the invaluable gift of over twenty-five years of collaboration and friendship with Steve. Now I get to have his award, too!
I think visually... so, even when I'm writing a play, I'm envisioning it.
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.
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.
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.
I am an off-Broadway, nonprofit kind of guy.
I love the visual aspect of the theater. But I like what people have to say, too.
As you get older, you realize happiness involves a lot of problems.
The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.
That's the thing about dreams - they're ineffable. If you can get to the bottom of it, it's not a dream.
