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" A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray. "

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" If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America. "

Terry Teachout

Looking

America

You

" I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. "

" Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can't save a bad film, and a bad score - so it's said - can't sink a good one. "

" Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. "

" I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. "

Terry Teachout

Never

Opera

" In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it 'Grand Illusion' or 'Duck Dynasty.' "

" In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. "

" No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. "

" Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century. "

" I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember. "

" What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure. "

" No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing. "

" I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so. "

" It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much. "

" One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor. "

" Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets. "

" A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like. "

Terry Teachout

Change

Mind

" I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. "

" Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.' "

" All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. "

" I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns. "

" Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher. "

" Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed. "

" Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. "

" The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics. "

" 'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours. "

" To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art. "

" A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. "

" There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri. "

" Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music. "