Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.
I personally am a very big fan of 'Romeo + Juliet.' It had a visceral power to it that I thought was just exhilarating. It was a very arresting and very disturbing and deeply compelling version of the play.
As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.
There is a real affection for these human beings on these stage that O'Neill really had. Out of that affection comes a lot of humor, which is unexpected when you think of 'The Iceman Cometh.'
Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
Racists are deficient as human beings.
I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.
I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.
Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.'
A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.
When you're writing, in theory, everybody is serving you. When you're directing, you're serving everybody - in the guise of acting like everybody's serving you. But you're really serving the materials. You're serving the actors. You're in charge, but it's not free.
You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.
I don't go, like, 'Hmm, I'm now going to create something for the black community.' I just feel this compelling urge. I just feel myself drawn to stories that I feel have a potency and immediacy.
Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.
The rules I sort of live by for my theater career, which I hope to live for my film career, is that if there's something that intrigues me or fascinates me, or I don't know how to do it, then I should do it.
A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.
I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.
I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.
