Sondheim Musical Quotes & Sayings

In many ways, I think I'm a good person for it. I mean, I'm not a musical theater dude. Or rather, I don't watch everything, and love everything, and have every album. The ones that I love - like I've seen The Wizard of Oz a hundred times. West Side Story I love. I love Singing in the Rain, I love White Christmas. I love the Dennis Potter ones like Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven. I love Sondheim. — James Ponsoldt

Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world. — Mandy Patinkin

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten. — Stephen Sondheim

Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That's why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations. — Willem Dafoe

Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about. — Stephen Sondheim

If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song. — Stephen Sondheim

I don't have any warm personal enemies. All the SOBs have died. — Clare Boothe Luce

If I could play any role in any musical, it would be Desiree in 'A Little Night Music' - Oh my, it is perfection. The character gets to be funny, beautiful, sexy and smart all at the same time and have two men fighting over her. The show is Stephen Sondheim at his absolute best ... need I say more? — Nancy Allen

'Sweeney Todd' is my favorite Sondheim musical. — Lesley Nicol

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. — Stephen Sondheim

My parents were what I like to call proper musical fans. Lots of Sondheim was played in the car. — Daniel Radcliffe

Think of something that you can do as opposed to all the things you can't do - and do that. — Kathleen Hanna

Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story. — Stephen Sondheim

Walk soft, like whispers. — Aimee Bender

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened. — Oscar Wilde

Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical. — Stephen Sondheim

The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body. — Rene Descartes

Lemuel Ayers had had a huge success producing and designing Kiss Me, Kate. He wanted to produce this as a musical. I got the job. It was a professional score. — Stephen Sondheim

He came from a rock band and even though he was not a lead singer, I knew he was musical just from that. I also knew that he was intelligent enough from talking to him, that he would not play this part unless he could handle it vocally. I knew he was not about to get up there and have to have his voice dubbed or come off croaking. So Johnny Depp casted Johnny Depp. I trusted him entirely. I knew that he was no fool and he would only do it if he felt he could handle it. I told him to listen to the score carefully and if you can handle it, fine by me, and I was right. — Stephen Sondheim