George C. Wolfe

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater. ”

The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private. ”

On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it's surprising which piece shows up. ”

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form. ”

A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence. ”

I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city. ”

Every single wave, when I was overwhelmed and poor and struggling in New York, there were these extraordinary people in New York who said, 'Come this way.' ”

The worst thing when you're working is to say, 'I have a question,' and the other person goes, 'No! This is what it is.' That kind of rigidity is very challenging because musicals are constantly mutating. ”

You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor. ”

Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It's forced a certain kind of maturity. ”