“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.”

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.

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

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.

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!

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

My definition of financial freedom is simple: it is the ability to live the lifestyle you desire without having to work or rely on anyone else for money.

God wants us so badly that he has made the condition as simple as he possibly could: Only believe.

Nothing in the world glorifies God so much as simple rest of faith in what God’s Word says.

If you want to prove yourself to God, improve yourself. Words of guidance are so simple, yet so deep – anybody can win, if he be the soul entry. Unfortunately, in every field.

My pitching philosophy is simple – keep the ball way from the bat.

People who win go outside of that box. It’s very simple when you look at it.