From the Leftover Quote File

On musical theater writing, from my February feature on multifacted playwright Laura Eason:

I once got this incredibly sweet email from Charles Strouse; he saw an adaptation of mine at 59E59 a couple of years ago, and completely out of the blue wrote me an email saying how much he enjoyed it, and I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. So I wrote him when I was trying to work on [some] musicals, "What is your advice about process?" And he said, "The advice is that there’s no process, and it really has to be dictated by who you’re in the room with, and what the material is, and what works for you is what you should do. How you’re going to use the music, how it’s going to function in relation to the book, and then once you know that, trying to execute it well."