Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by George C. Wolfe - Page 2

'Jelly,' more than any black musical before it, celebrated the majesty, the purity, the joy of so many artists who are unable to fully embody these same qualities in their own lives.

Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.

I think there's an aspect of my soul, of my personality, that's very suited to directing. I like being in the room with actors; I love creating a safe space and a chaotic space for the discovery to take place. I love creating a sense of community.

All the things that can happen to an artist regardless of how prepared they are and how smart they are and hard-working they are and attractive - doesn't matter. There's always somebody cuter. There just is.

Broadway was very vital back in the '20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season.

The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.

The black experience, which has nothing to do with my play 'Angels in America,' allowed me to understand the Mormon character. He was the character that couldn't come out to his mother. It allowed me to understand emotional and closeted behavior, because you're so acutely aware of how you're perceived.

You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.

With actors, I have very close, intense working relationships with actors in theater.

A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.

You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.

Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don't know why it's here.

Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.

If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.

The best of any artist is in their art.

Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.

Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

If I hadn't told stories, I would've been a historian.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

When I came to New York, I told everyone I was a writer/director, and they said, 'No.' There was a rule. You could be one or the other. They ordained me writer. But then I won the Obie for directing 'Spunk,' and the rules changed.

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.

I absolutely love working on musicals, but anytime I finish a project, I want to move on to something completely different.

I really don't find revivals very interesting because I like new work a lot. I feel like if you're going to pay me, then let me do what I do and let me try to solve some problems. Let me try to make something fly. Why would I do something that everybody has already done the hard work on? But that's me. Tons of people do revivals really well.

Surviving failure is one thing. Surviving success is... is challenging, with the consequences and what you lose along the way.

My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.

There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O'Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of 'The Iceman Cometh.'

A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.

Certain things come to me; I just become intrigued by them and want to live inside them.

One thing I tend to do is ask actors tons and tons of questions to try to get at what they're thinking but also to expose to them whatever box they've placed their characters in - to blow up that box so the journey can begin.

To me, 'Show Boat' was the first American musical, the first to have the real texture of this country.

The worst thing when you're working is to say, 'I have a question,' and the other person goes, 'No! This is what it is.' That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating.

Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.

Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.'

I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'

I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.

I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.

'You Gotta Have Heart' is one of the most ridiculously perfect, amazing musical comedy songs ever.

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you're instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do.

A friend of mine said that when Barack Obama was running for president, there was a whole generation of white kids who are used to looking up to a black person center stage speaking. And that's because of hip-hop. So there was no adjustment. A person of color in authority at times is very startling to people. But as time goes on, it becomes less startling.

With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately it is a folk-art form.

I'm dancing to the music of the madness inside me.

It's very important for an audience to know where they are and why they are there in a musical. It allows them to relax and follow this form that operates in shorthand. So the economy of the form, in many respects, is why a lot of screenwriting is so sleek. Because the visuals are where the explosions happen.

Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it's supposed to be, there's a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it's followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over.

God created black people and black people created style.

I'm watching the show and I'm watching the audience watch the show. Because once you leave the rehearsal room, you have space and you can see it. You can watch them watch it. You can't see your work, really, until you're in the theater. You have no perspective. That's not part of my job, to go, "Oh my God, they're so brilliant." I'm not required to swoon.

I think musicals are a lowbrow, populist art form. And I don't mean lowbrow in a condescending way at all - they are designed to create delight, wonder, joy, surprise. And what becomes really interesting is when innovative or challenging or smart people take it and use the easy runway that the form allows to take people to another planet, or another place. Or subvert it in some way.