Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it's supposed to be, there's a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it's followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over.

With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.

I'm watching the show and I'm watching the audience watch the show. Because once you leave the rehearsal room, you have space and you can see it. You can watch them watch it. You can't see your work, really, until you're in the theater. You have no perspective. That's not part of my job, to go, "Oh my God, they're so brilliant." I'm not required to swoon.

I think musicals are a lowbrow, populist art form. And I don't mean lowbrow in a condescending way at all - they are designed to create delight, wonder, joy, surprise. And what becomes really interesting is when innovative or challenging or smart people take it and use the easy runway that the form allows to take people to another planet, or another place. Or subvert it in some way.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you're instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do.

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately it is a folk-art form.

The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.