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"After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes."
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"You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out."
"I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed."
"98% of all comedians feel obliged to be funny when interviewed. Less than 2% succeed."
"We didn't know anything about comedy duos - Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis - we didn't know anything about that. Kim Fields showed us a tape of Martin and Lewis and their old shows and they come through the curtain so we started doing research on them."
"Comedy to me has always seemed a social tightrope for the comedian. For all axioms intellectually sound the general public would prefer to be amused, but in those emotionally sound, it then chooses to get offended."
"In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed."
"I basically did comedy there for about a year, and then moved to New York. If I had it to do over again, I would have booked myself on the road for at least a year."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Sondheim
"Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on."
"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."
"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."
"By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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