Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
Stephen SondheimRead
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
Interpretation
Musical comedies require multiple drafts and revisions before they achieve their final form.
Stephen Sondheim highlights the iterative nature of creating musical comedies, emphasizing that they often undergo extensive rewrites to hone their storytelling, dialogue, and music. This process reflects the idea that great art is rarely created in a single attempt and that revision is essential for quality and depth.
In practice
During a workshop on musical theater, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of feedback and revision.
Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
Let Pirelli's / Miracle Elixir / Activate your roots, sir... Keep it off your boots, sir- / Eats right through. Yes, get Pirelli's! / Use a bottle of it! / Ladies seem to love it... Flies do, too!
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last Past what you can see And turn against you... Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell.
Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies!
The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.
I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.
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