Over the past year, I have been consuming a lot of podcasts from the American Theatre Wing because they have an entire range of free and highly valuable interviews with some of the greatest practitioners ever on Broadway.
It’s an incredible learning experience just hearing these masters of Broadway dispense their pearls of wisdom.
I have learnt a great deal from all these podcasts.
Recently, I re-visited this Sondheim interview which I’ve listened through many times now, and he said something which really caught my attention, when he was discussing about the whole concept of lyrics and how his compares with Oscar Hammerstein’s and all that.
He said:
“Lyrics do not exist on paper. They only exist with music. They are not poetry. Poetry is about concision. Lyrics are about giving room for the music to breathe.”
On another note, the other day I can’t remember what I was reading, or what I was listening to, but I remember another great practitioner on Broadway saying something like “the audience is the final collaborator”.
What he meant was that you can collaborate with all the people in the creative team in producing a play or musical, but at the end of the day, a production is never complete until it has been placed in front of an audience.
The audience’s response to the production is what finally makes it complete.
