57 Quotes by John Lahr

Questions about political theatre always overlook America’s most powerful and effective political theatre, which is always thriving: the American musical. The politics is conservative but, to my mind, effective and insidious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it’s another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don’t know what they’ve made until they’ve made it.