A Quote by Stephen Sondheim

Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

Stephen Sondheim

Quote Topics

Audience Before Collaboration Collaborator Complete Got Last Musicals Plays Wait Your

Quote Author

Stephen Sondheim
American - Composer
Born: March 22, 1930

Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

Stephen Sondheim

The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well -- work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece -- suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

Stephen Sondheim

Composing easy? I find it easy if - big if - the idea is right, if I have the right collaborator, and if my collaborator is in the room. I like my collaborator to be in the room.

Alan Menken

The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.

Baron Vaughn

A collaboration, you have to collaborate, meet in the middle, yield to the other collaborator, and that's a wonderful thing.

Ty Segall

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

Jeff Tweedy

Til shade is gone, til water is gone Into the shadow with teeth bared Screaming defiance with the last breath To spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.

Robert Jordan

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

Lynn Nottage

You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.

Martin Scorsese

When the last sea is sailed and last shallow charted, When the last field is reaped and the last harvest stored, When the last fire is out and the last guest departed Grant the last prayer that I pray, Be good to me, O Lord.

John Masefield

I think there's something in collaboration - the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people... The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.

Darren Aronofsky

Every lord's mansion stands on the foundation of your bones, soldier, every field has been saturated with your sweat, and you, peasant, even if you worked your arms down to the stub, if you won a hundred battles, and faithfully gave the last drop of your blood for your country, you would always be a slave. There is no land for you, no heaven, no shelter, not even a doghouse where you could rest your poor head. You are the last before God and before people, the last one.

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

I'd probably end up doing the same thing over and over. We're creatures of habit. We know what we know. With collaboration...and I'm not just talking about music, I'm talking about in life - if you're a good listener and you have your ears open, and to be a good collaborator you have to be able to listen, you can learn something from somebody else.

Dave Koz

I carry themes in my mind for years before I will try to compose them. I've got themes that will last me now 'til I die.

R. B. Kitaj

The only way to conduct an effective collaboration is to debate the things upon which you disagree. If one doesn't manage to bring the other around to his point of view, then whichever collaborator feels the most passionate about the thing being debated ought to get his way.