Quotes from Terry Teachout

The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical.

If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.

Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.

The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there.

I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.

If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.

Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.

I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.

There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.

A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like.

You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.'

What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.

All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.

Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it.

Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age.

Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.

David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America.

There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.

Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.

The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.