"The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical."
"I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember."
"I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz."
"There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri."
"The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall."
"If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle."
"I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto."
"A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself."
"Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it."
"I learned more in the rehearsals for 'The Letter' than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn't make me a better critic, I'm an idiot."
"The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics."
"The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there."
"In a world without any criticism at all, although there are many actors who would think they would be delighted to see that happen, would in fact be a far more problematic world than they could ever imagine."
"Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher."
"There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative."
"David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America."
"There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy."
"All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz."
"I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people."
"Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays."
"It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much."
"I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.'"
"I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock."
"One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor."
"At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction."
