Robert Lopez Quotes

While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

I love characters songs and I love to fit into a story. I love singing through a character's journey.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

Getting to do 'December Songs' in a cabaret-style format was so interesting because it's like a one-woman song cycle that actually tells a story. It feels like a theatrical experience more than a cabaret because I didn't talk in between. We went from one song to the next, nine songs in a row - bam - I told the story in half an hour.

If you are opening a play, a play that's really about something, a play that's really about ideas, you have to find a way to sell that play.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

In a play, a man comes out and says something. Another man comes out and says something. And by the end of the night, we've learned something we didn't know, In a musical, there is singing and dancing for two hours, but you've got to know everything in 5 minutes. Do it in those 5 minutes or you'll lose them.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

I never dreamed that the little ditties I wrote about annoying customers or bagel recipes would turn into a full-length musical comedy. But a very wise person told me to 'write what you know'. So I did.

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.