Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Born June 22, 1906

…I was a guy who was trying to speak to as many people as I possibly could. I was not a guy who was writing deep-dish revelations, or writing a play like Waiting for Godot. That did not interest me. It interested me to lift the taste of the average person, just lift it a little bit.

Conversations with Wilder, by Cameron Crowe, p.233

Gone March 27, 2002

Thank you all, but this award has to be shared with Julius Epstein, Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, George Furth, Jim Goldman, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine. These are the men who created the characters that sang the songs, the situations that gave rise to the songs and the criticism that improved the songs. They were my collaborators. They are called playwrights. They invent. They make whole cloth out of nothing. They make a hat where there never was a hat. And they don’t just write musicals.

(excerpt from letter read by Mandy Patinkin on the CBS telecast, concerning Steve’s 2008 Special Tony Award® for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre)

You do know I mean Stephen Sondheim, don’t you?
He’s a former president of the Dramatists Guild.

• Hurley’s Mom
• Jesus Christ is not a weapon.
• As said to Hurley, Lost, Season 4, Ep. 12

The world is in our minds, it’s up to us
whether it changes or remains the same.

playwright Carlyle Brown,  The Fula from America

It’s an ethical obligation to look for hope.
It’s an ethical obligation not to despair.

Tony Kushner, Wrestling with Angels
Catch it this weekend on a PBS replay.

• Philip Henslowe
• Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
• Hugh Fennyman
• So what do we do?
• Philip Henslowe
• Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
• Hugh Fennyman
• How?
• Philip Henslowe
• I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
• Tom Stoppard, the film Shakespeare in Love

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Born 152 years ago today.

When we were in Paris a few years ago, The Beloved and I paid homage to Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetary. These words are inscribed on his tombstone:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

MBH insists the only perfect play ever written is The Importance of Being Ernest.

If you’ve got time to waste, you might as well waste it listening to people.

It is St. Paddy’s day, after all.