Quotes from Ethan Mordden

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

Go for the hum.

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

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

The Parade is not diplomacy," Chris pointed out. "It's celebration.

Those who see Show Boat as the progenitor of the form mistake its epic grandeur for its essence. No: most of Show Boat inheres in the zany frivolity of musical comedy, though revisions have been stamping out much of the fun since 1946. Still, the comic nature of Captain Andy and other leads and the use of dance as decoration rather than interpretation place Show Boat in a category of its own.

Layton combined dialogue, song, and dance in a fluidly shifting action

Walt, examining Chris's record collection, said, "You have four different recordings of Carousel." "It's my favorite thing on earth." "Is that because it says that people die but true love lasts forever?" "I … Maybe. I thought I just liked the music." To Tom, behind Walt's back, she mouthed, "How'd he get so smart?

Not simply every number is tuneful, as in, say, The Boys From Syracuse. Not even every number exhilarates character, as in My Fair Lady. Rather: every number makes the experience so vivid that we are reminded that music theatre is our highest—our most complete—art.

Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.

Unlike Grand Hotel and Titanic, but like The Wild Party and Sweet Smell of Success, our last special show was a failure. However, the previous two titles at least ran a few months. Amour (2002) lasted two weeks. This is a historically instructive show even so in its return to first principles, as a modern version of what Jacques Offenbach was doing when he invented musical comedy in the 1850s and '60s: not in his format but in his spirit.

Legrand shares with his predecessor that rare ability to joke in music just as his librettist jokes in words. The composer has in fact termed Amour "an opéra-bouffe"—Offenbach's own form.

Sensible is a powerful notion to lay upon children. So much of the world does seem sensible, even when it may impede or even destroy our sense of self-esteem. Sensible looks easy because everyone claims to be doing it. But sensible, really, is some grown-up telling you that you can't have what you want. So

Jane Eyre, Thou Shalt Not, and Thoroughly Modern Millie typify currents running through the musical today: one, the extra-musical musical play that encroaches on opera; two, the rehabilitation of dance after years of neglect; and, three, the musical-comedy revival.

Gable suited MGM because Gable was larger than life. Cagney suited Warner Brothers because Cagney was life.

And no one knows a show like its stage manager.

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