When you make new musicals, you have the great freedom and the great burden that it can be changed.

Whenever you do a new interpretation of a great, previous text of any kind, you always look for some kind of immediate significance right now.

I'm sort of a Freudian about theater; it's always a struggle between freedom and security, between 'Do I stay where I am with my family because I love them or do I follow the thing that makes my heart feel the greatest?'

We get a lot of raps as Americans for being small-minded, but in fact, when you really drill down to the core of the culture, there's an enormous amount of compassion and forgiveness and support.

That's the best thing that classic can do, is it can return to us from our own past to give us lessons about the future, and it can give us a sense of both who we were and who we could become.

The last romantic novel I think I read was 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles.'