For anyone approaching any one of the cast albums, if they don't like what they hear, it's not the performer's fault.

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

The man i'll never be, Who remembers him?

Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It's a kind of public humiliation.