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" Although the 'New York Times' annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There's a lot of life yet in the old tart. "
John Lahr
Broadway
Old
New York
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" Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage. "
John Lahr
Stage
She
Observation
" Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look. "
John Lahr
Theatre
Trust
Knowledge
" 'The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak. "
John Lahr
Street
Always
Drama
" Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public. "
John Lahr
Gone
American
Selling
" We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own. "
John Lahr
History
Rise
Living
" In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding. "
John Lahr
Building
Future
Think
" Writers don't always know what they mean - that's why they write. Their work stands in for them. On the page, the reader meets the authoritative, perfected self; in life, the writer is lumbered with the uncertain, imperfect one. "
John Lahr
Page
Work
Self
" Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising. "
John Lahr
Advertising
People
Society
" Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble. "
John Lahr
Audience
Take
Inspired
" Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot. "
John Lahr
American
Waiting
Laugh
" Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century. "
John Lahr
Dream
Momentum
Story
" When Elvis made his mass-media debut on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' - his notorious gyrations filmed only from the waist up - I fell off the family chaise longue with delight. "
John Lahr
Up
Family
Off
" I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally, this doesn't always happen. "
John Lahr
Time
Theatre
Go
" A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it. "
John Lahr
Walk
Education
Experience
" The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents. "
John Lahr
Generation
British
Her
" His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg. "
John Lahr
Inside
Life
Egg
" 'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.' "
John Lahr
Angels
Drama
Most
" Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt. "
John Lahr
Game
Play
Rules
" Broadway shows in New York draw two times the attendance of all New York sports teams put together. "
John Lahr
Attendance
New York
Sports
" Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah. "
John Lahr
Talking
Fly
Road
" I was the first critic ever to win a Tony - for co-authoring 'Elaine Stritch at Liberty.' Criticism is a life without risk; the critic is risking his opinion, the maker is risking his life. It's a humbling thought but important for the critic to keep it in mind - a thought he can only know if he's made something himself. "
John Lahr
Win
Know
Life
" Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out before us like a banquet; everything was for the taking, especially hearts. "
John Lahr
Life
Age
Joy