John Lahr Quotes

28 quotes in 667 categories

• In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio,…
• Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.
• I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!
• Broadway shows in New York draw two times the attendance of all New York sports teams put together.
• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.
• I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally, this doesn't always…
• Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.
• The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.
• A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In…
• Although the 'New York Times' annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There's a lot of life…
• Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical…
• Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to…
• Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of…
• I was the first critic ever to win a Tony - for co-authoring 'Elaine Stritch at Liberty.' Criticism is a life without risk; the critic…
• In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National…
• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the…
• Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she…
• Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida,…
• The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics…
• Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game…

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