John Lloyd Young Quotes

I think 'West Side Story' is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, musicals ever put onscreen - or stage, for that matter. I, frankly, like Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet' very much, too. I grew up with that... I loved it. I loved the score; I loved the acting.

I really like musicals - 'The Music Man,' 'Oklahoma!,' 'Li'l Abner,' 'Annie Get Your Gun.'

I got started as an actress doing musical theater, and I always loved 'Grease' and 'West Side Story,' and all those kind of movies.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.

'Sweeney Todd' is my favorite Sondheim musical.

My favorite musical? I don't. It changes all the time. I'm just a diehard, I'm totally old school, like I'll sit and watch, if they are re-doing Oklahoma in New York, I will be the first one there.

I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

In college, my voice never quite fit the classic ones like 'Music Man' or 'Carousel'.

We got to see Sondheim shows, 'Phantom of the Opera,' 'Cats' and all sorts of stuff. When you're 10 or 11 years old, it's just magnificent. The story-telling, the music - it lifts you out of your seat.

I grew up watching the films of 'Carousel' and 'Oklahoma' and 'The Music Man' and 'My Fair Lady' - all the classic musicals of that golden era, The sort of more modern musical theater, or what was modern when I was at a ripe teenage age, I wasn't really listening to that stuff. I was really more raised on the classics.

When 'The Sound of Music' aired live on NBC, 18 million people were talking about theater the next day. That's incredible. 'Grease' felt like a chance for me to participate in that landscape.

I love country songs. I love Broadway.

I've been singing Rodgers and Hammerstein all my life.

I was a Hollywood musical fan as a kid, and I know how rare it is for someone who originates the Broadway role to get to then do it on screen.

We would also go to musicals. So Singing In the Rain, On the Town, and West Side Story. Especially West Side Story because played that a lot before VCRs, so that would be something that would be a big deal if it came on, you caught it. So that really started, my family was not in show business at all but really loved that kind of thing.

Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they've studied the tapes of the old films. We didn't have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.

Being a gay married man, I love Broadway musicals.

Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

The children of each generation are taught to want what they are taught they must not have.

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

I would love to work on Broadway, but I don't know that it would manifest itself in musical theater.... I have terrible stage fright that I'd have to get over.

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

Of course the Disney movies, you know all the soundtracks, and anything Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were doing - Singing in the Rain was one of my favorite musicals I used to watch a lot because my mom came from a theatre background.

Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.