The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.

I'm a sucker for double meanings in titles.

My parents took me to shows starting when I was a very little kid. I remember seeing Henry IV at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC and our neighbor, who was playing Banquo, winked at me during the curtain call. I remember thinking "he can SEE ME?!" I was hooked from then. I wanted to be part of the place where you can escape the world, and also wink at it.

The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.

The real skill of being a writer is being able to take your inspired moments, and make them work as a whole, through the unromantic, daily hard work.

Theater and music are both collaborative media, and I think they're best when they combine different people's visions and aesthetics.

In terms of theater itself, no story is too strange or method of telling it too impossible these days. In many ways, musical theater has caught up with straight theater in that it's allowed more surreality and breaking of form, and that's really exciting to me - the challenge is getting people to produce those shows.