It's very hard to go from the intense self-criticism you need to have during previews to all of a sudden letting go of it and trying to enjoy the moment, but I'm doing my best and I'm finally beginning to relax a little bit.

If you're doing a musical, you should be out to give the audience something special, emotional, an uplifting feeling, something that stays with them.

It's very hard to go from the intense self-criticism you need to have during previews to all of a sudden letting go of it and trying to enjoy the moment, but I'm doing my best and I'm finally beginning to relax a little bit.

I only like to write shows that I feel like no one has seen before.

I'm not an advocate of true rhymes, I don't think. I think that everyone who writes musical theater needs to know how to do true rhymes, because that's the tradition of it, but I do think that in order for the art form to grow, it's important to not let tradition get in the way of innovation. There's all kinds of reasons not to use true rhyme in a lyric, like with off-color humor.

Whenever Disney asks if you want to do a fairy tale musical, you say yes.

Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.