What we're talking about in the development of musical theater is competing with other media. The theatre must provide entertainment--"entertainment" is a pejorative; the hell with that! Entertainment!--which is unique and separate from what you get on television and in a movie theatre. That isn't as hard as it sounds, because the relationship between a live actor and the audience is a unique and thrilling thing, and that's what you should be dealing with--plus imagination, which television doesn't invite at all. That's what the future of the theater lies in, and that's all.

Luck is such an incredible factor in directing shows on Broadway. I don't think that working in summer stock helps you one bit in getting ahead in the theater. I don't think you learn a hell of a lot from painting somebody else's scenery. The roar of the greasepaint and all that is fun, sure--so long as you realize that's what you're getting out of it. I think the regional theaters, which are enormously different from summer stock, are very instructive. If I were starting out now I'd take work wherever I could get it, but I'd prefer to work in a regional theatre where there is criticism and professionalism, where you aren't so inured from the realities of the outside world that you're stuck in self-congratulatory situations. And then, unless you get your foothold in a regional theatre, in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or ACT in San Francisco or someplace, you come to New York and you just have to hustle for a job--it's really hard. Certainly the life of the theatre is such now that all of us, anybody with a brain who wants to work, are working everywhere. That's how you see everyone.

This will come as a surprise to you, but I think there aren't all that many ambitious people around with talent. In fact, the only absolutely talented people who have been destroyed by their experience in theater--people with real talent--have been self-destructive. And part of that is because the odds and tensions of working in the theatre seems so terrible, the ambition you need to work is so enormous. But I do not believe that for a person with a certain amount of talent the opportunity to work on Broadway does not arise. Actors are the best example. I have never known an actor with a decent amount of talent who did not end up playing at least a featured role in a Broadway play. This goes for directors, too. Every director who directs a half-way decent production here in Boston, for example, gets a chance to work on Broadway because everybody is looking for directors who did something audacious.

As far as what I'm going to do after this show, Steve has an idea for a musicalization of a bizarre kind of piece that at first didn't interest me at all. Now it does because I got the notion to do it in the same theater and environment that we did Candide. That attracts me a lot, but I can't talk about it much because it's not in P.D. (public domain).

[Sondheim, during a talk at Harvard last week, embellished on this a bit more: "I have an opera in mind--very unexperimental, very straight-forward, very linear--just about people screaming at each other. Lots of blood and horror."]

I hate to say this, but I'm not the enthusiast about the theater I used to be, because it's not providing as much of the kind of theater I'd like to see. But the minute it does, nothing excites me as much as the theatre. On the other hand, I do not go to see everything. I wouldn't dream of it, because there are a whole lot of things I simply know I wouldn't like. But the minute there's an adventure going on I'm there and accessible as hell. Because I really love the theatre, much more than any other medium.

I don't have a clue to how "history" will regard me. I'd like to think that in fifty years somebody will be opening up a book about me, but I don't think so for a minute. That's because communications and media have made the world so enormous and impersonal that there's not much of a chance for people to "make history." You're in the eye for a while and people ask you what you're doing and the next thing you know someone else has taken your place.

I really am stuck with very corny thoughts sometimes. Like, there's no question but that every day when I get up in the midst of this show I say to myself: "You mean you actually get paid for this? People ask you what you think and are nice to you?...All of this for having a good time?"

I don't think theatre should ever be realistic. I just think that the power the theatre has is in the unreal. Brecht, Meyerhold, Artaud-you can make a list as long as your arm of the people I think served the stage in the right fashion. And that's what musicals ought to do.