Ethan Mordden Quotes & Sayings

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer. — Ethan Mordden

A flop is often the result of the fact that each of the talents involved, while working on the same project, may in effect have been working on a different show from all the others. If all contributors do not share the same vision of the evening, the end product will not evince the harmony of diverse elements-the seeming inevitability of book, score, and staging-of a good musical. — Ethan Mordden

The aficionado prefers a crazy bomb to a mediocrity, because the musical as a form has such potential as entertainment that the merely adequate can fatigue the spirit while the disaster can amuse with its drastic misjudgments and desperation gambles. — Ethan Mordden

The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that? — Ethan Mordden

For most singers the first half of the career involves extending one's repertoire, the second half trimming it. — Ethan Mordden

College wasn't more school, as Chris had anticipated. School was a normalization of the familiar. College was a penetration into the exotic. — Ethan Mordden