John Lahr Quotations

At least six of the plays in Wilson's series are, I think, first rate, and one, 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone,' is a masterpiece.

It has the look of the avant-garde, but the heart of a Hollywood production. It's the ultimate expression of business art. ... You leave the theater and they guide you right into the store.

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.

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.

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

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.

The history of theatre is the history of first nights.

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.

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.

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

Entertainment is not politically neutral.

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.

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

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

Frivolity is the species' refusal to suffer.

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.

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.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.

Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

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.

Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

Broadway shows in New York draw two times the attendance of all New York sports teams put together.

I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out before us like a banquet; everything was for the taking, especially hearts.

I was the first critic ever to win a Tony - for co-authoring 'Elaine Stritch at Liberty.' Criticism is a life without risk; the critic is risking his opinion, the maker is risking his life. It's a humbling thought but important for the critic to keep it in mind - a thought he can only know if he's made something himself.

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.

We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.

Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah.

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.

The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.

Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage.

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.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

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.

Any play that makes an audience think out of the box, that makes connections to life and names our pain and by doing so makes our pain subject to thinking and the process of understanding, is doing something inherently political. By promoting understanding, by putting experience in context, by making connections between the normal and the rational, theatre is an act of anti-terrorism. It stimulates courage and a survival spirit. In that sense of political, there are a lot of serious plays doing their work in the world.

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.