John Lahr

The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.

— John Lahr

Broadway shows in New York draw two times the attendance of all New York sports teams put together.

— John Lahr

The pigeons are shitting on George M. Cohan. I shoo them off. They fly up and perch on his hat. Cohan would've…

— John Lahr

I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally,…

— John Lahr

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the…

— John Lahr

We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western…

— John Lahr

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale…

— John Lahr

Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

— John Lahr

I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!

— John Lahr

Entertainment is not politically neutral.

— John Lahr

In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in…

— John Lahr

The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice…

— John Lahr

I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

— John Lahr

Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the…

— John Lahr

Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed…

— John Lahr

Criticism is a life without risk.

— John Lahr

Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules…

— John Lahr

Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of…

— John Lahr

Most of the people dishing out judgment have no working experience of the theatre, have not written a professional play, a sketch,…

— John Lahr

I was the first critic ever to win a Tony - for co-authoring 'Elaine Stritch at Liberty.' Criticism is a life without…

— John Lahr

Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights…

— John Lahr

We live in a time of terror, and contrary to what we see on television and allow ourselves to believe, the real…

— John Lahr

Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

— John Lahr

First and foremost, I'd say my father, Bert Lahr ... gave me a love of theatre--its kinetic and emotional potential and its…

— John Lahr

Although the 'New York Times' annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There's a…

— John Lahr