Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
Stephen SondheimRead
Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Interpretation
The audience plays a crucial role in the completion of a musical, as their response shapes the final performance.
In this quote, Stephen Sondheim emphasizes the unique collaborative nature of musicals, highlighting that while they involve the work of writers, composers, and actors, the audience's reception is vital to the overall experience. The last collaborator, the audience, completes the artistic process, as their emotional responses and interactions ultimately influence how the work is perceived and enjoyed.
In practice
During a theater critique session, one might say Sondheim's quote to emphasize the importance of audience engagement.
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.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
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.
In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
I never think about themes. I let the music create itself. I like it to be a potpourri of all kinds of sounds, all kinds of colors, something for everybody, from the farmer in Ireland to the lady who scrubs toilets in Harlem.
There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did
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