Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
Stephen SondheimRead
Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Interpretation
Musicals involve collaboration not just among creators, but also with the audience, whose reactions complete the experience.
Stephen Sondheim emphasizes the essential role of the audience in the creation of musicals. While playwrights and composers collaborate during the production process, the final element that makes the work complete is the audience's engagement and response, suggesting that their involvement is just as important as the creators' contributions.
In practice
In a theater discussion, this quote can be used to highlight the interactive nature of performance art.
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.
What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.
The mystery was gone but the amazement was just starting.
It was - I'm very didactic in my lyrics, but I've always been drawn to mock my own emotions, and so I write this very lyric-heavy stuff, which suits theater and comedy much more than it suits pop.
If someone asked, 'What are your films like?,' the best I can come up with is that they're, like, a fine balance between comedy and drama. And they deal mainly with the clumsiness of humanity.
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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