Broadway Musical Quotes

I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones. ~ Evan Hunter

The comparison might strike you as farfetched. What (you might be asking) can a Broadway musical possibly add to the legacy of a Founding Father--a giant of our national life, a war hero, a scholar, a statesman? What's one little play, or even one very big play, next to all that?
But there is more than one way to change the world . To secure their freedom, the polyglot American colonists had to come together, and stick together, in the face of enormous adversity. To live in a new way, they first had to think and feel in a new way. It took guns and ships to win the American Revolution, but it also required pamphlets and speeches--and at least one play. ~ Jeremy McCarter

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes! ~ Les Miserables The Broadway Musical

I went to School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, and we had a bunch of singing classes. My first job in New York was an Off-Broadway musical. ~ Anna Camp

I can go out raw with nothing, and my fans would still be happy, but I feel that I owe it to them to give them almost like a Broadway musical at this point in my life. I have to give them something more, so I do have to think of different ways to do it. ~ Mary J. Blige

Don't know about a cabaret act right now, would actually prefer a role in a broadway musical. ~ Julia Barr

'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck. ~ James Wolcott

The producers and I first talked about the Big Fish musical, right before we did the first test screening of the movie. I said, "I think there's a Broadway musical here." And really, from that day, we started figuring out how we would do it. ~ John August

No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town. ~ Margo Jefferson

What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world`
With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)??
And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering.
Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
Get my point? ~ Chris Colfer

So much of me is made of what I learned from you; you'll be with me like a handprint on my heart and now whatever way our stories end I know you have re-written mine by being my friend ~ Stephen Schwartz

I was doing a Broadway musical called 'Smile' with Howard Ashman and Marvin Hamlisch in 1984/5 when it abruptly closed. Howard was in the middle of pre-production for 'The Little Mermaid,' so he kindly invited all the girls in our cast to audition for the film. ~ Jodi Benson

Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth." ~ David Bowie

It's always been a dream of mine to do a voice for a Disney movie. I think Disney movies and theater are very closely related. That would be amazing. I don't know about doing a Broadway musical, just because I don't really know how people do it. You just work all the time. That's something that I would definitely have to work up to. ~ Alexa Ray Joel

I wanted to be on Broadway, but in musical comedy. ~ Carol Burnett

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries. ~ Adam Gopnik

Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children. ~ Paul Rudnick

I would love to be in musical theater and be on Broadway. If someone were to offer me a position to do something like that, I wouldnt pass it down. Im a huge fan of musicals and I really want to do that. ~ Michelle Branch

...the history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other. ~ Jack Viertel

I was in a Broadway musical called Big Time Buck Wright.The play didn't make it but I was a success. It lasted six days but I sung four songs and there were critics, seriously, in New York who said that my part was perfect. So I can beat Joe Frazier singing. ~ Muhammad Ali

Recently, I was in New York with most of the Robertson family promoting the season-four premiere of Duck Dynasty. We were staying at the Trump International Hotel, which is a really nice place near Central Park. I was already uncomfortable being in the big city. I don't like traffic or concrete, and there are a lot of both in New York. After we checked in, we gathered downstairs to go to a Broadway musical show. I know it might seem bizarre for me to be going to a musical, but my very attractive wife can be mightily persuasive, especially when I have nothing else to do.
As we were waiting or the others in the lobby, I asked a doorman if there was a nearby bathroom. He gave me directions to the nearest restroom, which included a walk through the hotel restaurant. As I entered the restaurant, a well-dressed staffer offered his assistance. I informed him I was only going to the restroom. But he very nicely continued to offer assistance and took the role of my escort, which I thought was quite courteous and professional. At his direction, we took a quick left turn and walked out of the hotel. Befuddled, I asked him, "Where is the bathroom?" He painted down the street or maybe toward Central Park and said, "Good luck to you, sir. Have a nice day." I circled back around to the main entrance of the hotel, where I found Missy, who had witnessed the entire episode.
"I thought you had to go to the bathroom," she said.
I laughed and told her I had been escorted out of the ~ Jase Robertson

Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

It reminded him of the Sound of Music. Myron liked the ole Julie Andrews musical well enough. who didn't? but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics, actually. My Favorite Things. The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells for crying out loud.
You know what, Milly, I love doorbells. To hell with strolling on a quiet beach, or reading a great book, or making love or seeing a broadway musical. Doorbells, Milly, doorbells really punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people's houses and press their doorbells and, well, I think i am man enough to admit I shutter. ~ Harlan Coben

I want to do a big Broadway musical, at some point. I would love to do that. To do something there would be super-cool. ~ Lara Pulver

The definition of a musical is that the emotion is so strong that you can't talk anymore, you have to sing. The emotion isn't strong enough when you're just like, 'Let's take a second to sing about lamps!' ~ Rachel Bloom

I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting. ~ John C. McGinley

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing. ~ Jimmy Page

It's true that my mom loved it when I played Joanie Cunningham in the musical 'Happy Days,' but I think she finally realized I am never going to do 'Oklahoma!' ~ Christine Lakin

They all believed in him because of the authenticity of his musical talent and his faith in it. ~ Amit Kalantri

I would love to do Evita or Elphaba in Wicked. But I am more excited to originate a role on Broadway. ~ Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger. ~ Frank Rich

I want a TV series, I'm gonna do some acting jobs, I'm gonna do some Broadway jobs, everything! ~ Estelle

First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well. ~ Jose Garcia Villa

She laughed, and the sound was tantalizing. He didn't understand how musical notes could stroke a man's skin and dance along his thighs. He didn't understand how the notes could be an arrow that pierced his heart. She owned him. ~ Christine Feehan

I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up. ~ Steven Spielberg

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. ~ Sergei Rachmaninoff

My story is so boring: Long Island Jewish parents take their daughters to Broadway. ~ Idina Menzel

I thoroughly enjoyed working on Enemy of the State. Tony Scott is an important director, and has an amazing ability to express himself, and he doesn't do it in musical terms, he does it in emotional terms. I got along really well with him. ~ Trevor Rabin

I teach musical theater three days a week at the school that my wife and I graduated from. ~ Drew Lachey

There was talk of the Centaur being moved into the elephant cages to make room for a banjo-picking Minotaur. Surrendering his meager furnishings to a musical half man half bull was all bull. ~ Don Roff

I would love to do a talk show. Naturally, I would love to do more films. I'd love to be able to see casting directors more willing to put in a character who happens to be deaf. I'm not talking about doing deaf storylines, but putting in deaf characters. I'd love to be able to do Broadway. ~ Marlee Matlin

It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. ~ Frank Sinatra

I really did sneak into Broadway shows, starting when I was 12. ~ David Copperfield

Live theater is my favorite of all the mediums that I have worked in, so I have every intention on coming back to Broadway. ~ Taye Diggs

No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone. ~ Olivier Messiaen

I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My name ain't Keith, so could you lease stop Sweatin' me. ~ Big Daddy Kane

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist. ~ Beck

How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns. ~ John Milton

The jazz guitarist Peter Sprague calls his home recording studio SpragueLand, but sometimes it seems that the moniker better captures the way he has turned the entire southland into his own musical playground. Sprague is a highly versatile musician who draws on the wellsprings of jazz and Brazilian music as primary influences. ~ Andrew S. Gilbert

Well, the most important thing in choreographing for a specific tune is to get the story line and try to make your movements, rather than just actual movements, let them become more or less a physical drama to, to what they were singing about. And uh, also, uh, honor the beat and the rhythmic pattern of the musical track. ~ Cholly Atkins

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it. ~ Hector Berlioz

Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is the music. You can't take that away. The only person who can take that away from you is you. ~ Mike Stern

The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us. ~ James Russell Lowell

I know that people don't listen to music much in the way when they'll put on a CD, sit down, have a drink or go on a car journey. People pick and choose and just listen to tracks. But when I make a record, I try to think about it as a 50 minute musical journey, so the mood is very important, as is the sequence of the songs. ~ Loudon Wainwright III

I march to a different drummer, whose location, identity, and musical training haven't yet been established. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

To enter into that karaoke mindset, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means 'empty hand.' They're both 'empty' arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind
only courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain. ~ Rob Sheffield

My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It's kind of flipped, and I'm not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there. ~ Grant Gustin