A Quote by Michael Arden

Say you have a young black kid, and you come to see a Sondheim show. You love the material, but you look on stage, and you don't see anyone who looks like you. That puts a barrier between the audience and what they're trying to absorb.
At a show, I'll look out from the stage and see a woman with a pearl necklace next to a guy in a Grateful Dead T-shirt next to a young kid with his mom. It's fun to see them all together.
"I've never see you do something like this before and I'd love to see you try." For a young actor, that's about the most exciting thing that anyone can say to you.
It's hard as a young person of a different ethnicity or background to look at the TV and not see anyone who looks like you. Representation is very important.
Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we're beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what's going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.
The way we have been programmed and conditioned to think about the black kid being an athlete, it's like every young black boy people would see say 'what sport do you play?' instead of just asking 'what do you do?' 'What are you interested in?'
It's important to read books and see people who look like you. It helps you know that you are not the only one or the weird one because you're a black girl and you are not seeing anyone who looks like you in these books.
The easy answer is to say that it's a part for black people to see black heroes, but to me it's important to young Mexican kids to see a black hero.
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
In all my years in show business - on stage, clubs and TV shows - my audience has been 75 percent white. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City I look out at the crowd and only see a few black faces here and there. But I can't allow myself to be conscious of the race factor. I couldn't perform my best under those conditions.
You know, you're doing the same show every day, and your inspiration, you have to look no further than the fact that you know people travel across the country to see you. In a lot of cases, this is that audience's only chance to see the thing, and so, that's what gets you up in the morning, and that's what gets you giving your best performance on stage, is the awareness that this audience is ready for it, and here to have an experience, and so in turn are you.
I don't think anyone's particularly conscious of thinking suits are the thing, but when you see a comedian on stage in jeans and a t-shirt it doesn't matter how good they are - it always looks like amateur hour when they walk onto the stage.
I've had frank conversations with theaters who say, 'We love your play, but we've already done a play by another black person this year,' or 'I don't think the kind of people you write about are the ones our audience wants to see'... Up and coming young black female writers are still struggling to have their voices heard and have their plays produced.
Come warm weather, I'm going to take a kid fishing; I hope you do to. But nothing would make me happier than to look across the cove or down the stream and see a young one help an old one remember what it is like to be young in Springtime.
Man, you can come see me six or seven times in a row and you'll never see the same show twice, because I don't like to be robotic onstage. I like to perform for that particular audience.
You can only absorb when you look back at photos: like when we played Coachella, and there are thousands of people in the audience, and you just walk on stage.
The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.
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