Quotes from lahr john

Entertainment is not politically neutral.

First and foremost, I'd say my father, Bert Lahr ... gave me a love of theatre--its kinetic and emotional potential and its raffish backstage fun--and also set an artistic example of the importance of corrupting an audience with pleasure.

Frivolity is the species' refusal to suffer.

I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

Because of the sexual politics of previous eras, the comediennes to whom Roseanne [Barr] sees herself linked--Mae West, Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball--got their way by cunning indirection. But Roseanne prefers the head butt to the bon mot. She can rumble.

The only thing I get from the theatre is a sore arse.

His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

Momentum was part of the exhilaration and the exhaustion of the twentieth century which Coward decoded for the British but borrowed wholesale from the Americans.

The history of theatre is the history of first nights.

We live in a time of terror, and contrary to what we see on television and allow ourselves to believe, the real goal of terror is not to kill people but to kill thought; to so demoralize a society that it implodes from within.

The pigeons are shitting on George M. Cohan. I shoo them off. They fly up and perch on his hat. Cohan would've never given his regards to Broadway if he saw how dirty they kept his statue in Duffy Square. New Yorkers walk right by. Nobody cares.

Criticism is a life without risk.

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.

Most of the people dishing out judgment have no working experience of the theatre, have not written a professional play, a sketch, or even a joke; have never worked in a theatre, taken an acting class, or published any extended piece of work. They are creative virgins; everything they know about theatre is book-learned and second-hand.

A cruel critic has never made anything; his glibness is a way of inflicting his emptiness on others.