Alan Menken Quotes

When 'night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.

I can't tell you the thrill and joy of when I was cast in my first Broadway show. Granted, it was 'Starlight Express' and it was exhausting, but it was my first time on Broadway, and there was nothing like it.

I got my Equity card from an audition out of Backstage. We did 'Guys and Dolls' and 'Kismet.'

I'm the lucky one who got asked to do 'The Sound of Music' and all the other lovely things that I did.

The one thing I have always felt about musical theatre is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, about construction.

It takes a while to get a show on, and I've a number that have not yet been produced. I want to see all of them produced spectacularly before I pack it in.

I was in 'Hair,' which didn't work in London, but it was a show we all believed in.

When I was a producer, the fun of the show was waking up with a hit and enjoying the period after the show opens. The fun of a director stops the day it opens. No matter if it's a success or a failure, it's not a whole lot of fun anymore.

It was always my dream, to do a leading role on Broadway. It's what I went to college to do, in hopes of one day someone taking a chance on me and saying, 'You know what? You're going to be our girl.'

I want to do a big Broadway musical, at some point. I would love to do that. To do something there would be super-cool.

I've seen a lot of 'Show Boats,' but I've never seen the one that thoroughly satisfies me.

I want to toy around with producing a Broadway show.

Writing an opera and premiering in England, you could say I was going right into the eye of the storm and I came out successfully. A little tattered and bruised, but so what, I made it.

When I saw my first Broadway show, 'Beauty and the Beast,' I was like, 'Okay, I'm definitely gonna do this.' After that, I did little shows and started auditioning.

I don't even know how many times I auditioned for Danny Zuko in 'Grease.'

For the first time I go to La Scala, for each thing, for each rehearsal, my knees were shaking. But the audience was very fine with me.

I started my career without fans.

No, I tell you what I like is having the play close after a decent run and looking back on it and saying, yes, I did that, and wasn't it wonderful? Because while you're doing it, it is really tough. It is so hard.

'Bonnie and Clyde' was the first show and the first role that I got to originate. Being part of that from the ground up and investing three years of my life into seeing that show come to Broadway was really rigorous but also so exciting.

'The Producers' is a sort of a once in a lifetime kind of phenomenon, and I was grateful to be a part of it.

I always thought of my career as a body of work and not just about numbers.

I had done the sitcom thing to lesser and lesser degrees of success.

I was excited that my films would finally see the light of day and people would see them. But I never imagined that such nice things would be said about a lot of my films.

I'm a kid that went to theater school. I thought I was going to be making my living doing plays regionally or in New York or on Broadway, and maybe if I got lucky I would do a movie here or there.

The birth of any show is always a rough one.