A biography for Robert Lopezhasn’t been written yet.
“We love the great Disney songs - they have always inspired us in our work and in our lives! But for 'Let It Go,' we looked elsewhere - to powerful female singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Aimee Mann, Sara Bareilles, Adele.”
“I don't know any Mormon that doesn't have warm memories of their family.”
“This is one of my lesser moments, and one I'm not proud to admit to, but there's always a time I feel the need to have control over the process and try to defend the song from the person I'm writing with. It never, ever helps and always causes problems.”
“It's so important, after a song is finished, to go to sleep and listen to the song with fresh ears the next day. It's sometimes a traumatic event. And playing it for someone else for the first time - that is the most nerve-wracking thing of all. But we learn so much.”
“Whenever Disney asks if you want to do a fairy tale musical, you say yes.”
“On Broadway, there is no censoring, just self-censorship and doing what makes sense.”
“I only like to write shows that I feel like no one has seen before.”
“When we wrote 'Avenue Q,' we worked hard to create something that could be funny and satirical but also had some surprise moments of heart, moments when the music itself could become a central player and create something sweet and moving.”
“I always have to re-learn the important lesson that the work is always stronger when I listen and take input from others.”
“I think one of my favorite productions ever was Sondheim's 'Assassins' at the Roundabout in 2004. Beyond brilliant.”
“I did a musical episode of 'Scrubs.'”
“If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.”
“In 'Winnie the Pooh,' a lot of the characters have serious flaws: Pooh is sort of a food addict. Rabbit is OCD, and Owl is a compulsive liar.”
“I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.”
“There's been a lot of Catholic parody - 'Nunsense,' 'Sister Mary Ignatius' - I think they've almost been done to death, actually.”
“I don't think I met an actual Mormon until college, and by that time, I was wary of them. I knew about the church through school and, secondhand, through non-Mormon friends.”
“If you're doing a musical, you should be out to give the audience something special, emotional, an uplifting feeling, something that stays with them. And you're not going to do that by bumming them out.”
“When a good idea sparks, it's usually because of some subversive angle that means the song we're writing will be fresh.”
“Whenever someone wants to say something to a whole mass of people by breaking into song, there's probably something wrong with them.”