A biography for Terry Teachouthasn’t been written yet.
“Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.”
“I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.”
“I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.”
“Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.”
“If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.”
“No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.”
“Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought.”
“There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.”
“Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own.”
“'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.”
“The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.”
“Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them.”
“Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.”
“The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater.”
“What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure.”
“A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.”
“For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.”
“The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical.”
“There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.”
“It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.”