“EVERY SINGLE DANCER, SINGER and BAND MEMBER is a BRILLIANT SOLO ARTIST”

It’s nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere – on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

I’ve seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That’s the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

Be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.

I have received hostile voice mail messages and e-mails. They are often anonymous, I’m sad to say, as anonymous messages are delivered only by very low forms of human life, in my opinion.

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging … in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set.

Laramie’ often brings to mind ‘Our Town,’ the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire.

The cliche was always that ‘everybody’s a critic,’ but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover – somewhere in the thickets of the Internet – reactions to shows from people who’ve seen them in previews.

Cyndi Lauper knows how to work a crowd.

Rage properly channeled can definitely give birth to good even great theater. Disgust, a more passive and distancing emotion, is far less likely to. Would you rush to a play called Look Back in Queasiness?

The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released “Money”, it wouldn’t even get played.

I got my influences from 70s bands – Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah.

Punk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded.

So I would come in on the upbeat of one. I would wait until the band played the chord, and then as quickly as I could come in play the chord.

There were dinosaur big bands, and that was great. Those were my influences.

I just wanted to remind people that Ministry is actually a good rock band. We can do some party stuff, too.

I’ve always loved music videos – I used to make my own for bands like Pearl Jam.

She is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.