When you say you don’t want to write the “wrong” song, I think what you are saying is that you have to understand why there is a song—what its purpose will be in the storytelling and how it serves that overall dramatic arc. SONDHEIM: I guess it comes from my training under Oscar: always think character and story, and then you think about the song.

Yvonne sang the second line, “It’s hot and it’s monotonous,” someone yelled from the audience, “It sure is!” People laughed.

It took me a long time to learn that getting people to like you is not part of the job description.

Once when I was trying to get a song out of him, Steve said to me, “Do you want it Tuesday, or do you want it good?”

as we were walking over to the opening-night party at Sardi’s, my father said sweetly, “You didn’t tell me that you put your grandfather in the show.” I had never met his father, who passed away long before I was born and about whom I really knew nothing. “What are you talking about, Dad?” I said. “My father, Louis. He was a baker.” That stopped me

And it comes right out of the scene. That’s the Rodgers and Hammerstein principle for carrying forward a dramatic moment. In this case, George is announcing that he has turned down a commission and that he doesn’t know what to do next.

By then, I’d heard Bernadette speak the role, and the accent suggested to me Harold Arlen. He was a Buffalo boy who kept writing southern-inflected music, and I thought, southern inflection … hey, there’s my favorite composer. And I was off and running.

I’ll often put the script on the easel of the piano and just look at it, sometimes sort of sing it in my head.

that it was the eighties and a lot of the crew was doing drugs.