Words matter. These are the best John Lahr Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.
Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.
‘The New Yorker’s’ drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were ‘teen-agers’ – a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later – a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.
In 1957, ‘West Side Story’ had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.
Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.
‘Angels in America’ – which is composed of two three-hour plays, ‘Millennium Approaches’ and ‘Perestroika’ – proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie.’
‘Death of a Salesman’ is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.
The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation’s most promising talents.
Writers don’t always know what they mean – that’s why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one.
His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.
I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally, this doesn’t always happen.
Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.
Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, ‘West Side Story’ incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.
Although the ‘New York Times’ annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There’s a lot of life yet in the old tart.
When Elvis made his mass-media debut on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ – his notorious gyrations filmed only from the waist up – I fell off the family chaise longue with delight.
In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.
