You cannot help but notice that schools that take music seriously tend to be more academically successful.
I wonder what would have happened if automation and computers had existed when 'Oklahoma!' was having its out-of-town try-out, and three days before closing in Boston, when it was still called 'Away We Go,' they added a new song called 'Oklahoma!' I don't think that could happen today. It's almost impossible to change musicals on the go now.
I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.
Disgracefully, the arts have too often borne the brunt of short-sighted cuts to educational budgets.
'School of Rock' is fun. Hopefully, I've fleshed it out with a few catchy songs and kept the spirit of the original movie.
I've often thought that we left the original 'Phantom' with a little bit of a cliff hanger, and I thought, 'Well, why not to do a sequel to it' at one point.
I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.
Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
I put a hell of a lot of myself into 'Love Never Dies,' and I felt quite drained afterwards.
It's interesting that the wondrous 'Hamilton,' which I could not be more ecstatic about, has taken a long time to perfect to bring it to Broadway. And it wouldn't have been possible if it was developed in the commercial theatre from the get-go.
I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn't do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn't sing two.
At one point I couldn't move or get out of bed or anything. I developed blood clots because I'd been completely inactive. Then they thought - because the pain was so much - I had an infection in the bones, so they gave me pills, which gave me a tummy infection. It's like a French farce.
What strikes me is that there's a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.
I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.
Well we'd just seen Gerry. I think he wanted somebody who had that authority and was handsome. The thing is, he's a big hunk isn't he? All I can say, if you look at his chat line, or the Phantom website, it's quite worrying. Because the girls really seem to love him.
Glenn Slater is my lyricist who, of the new young lyricists coming along, is the most exciting, I think.
Negative things, and they were all deliberate and I'm not going to say who they were but I know who they were and it was in the business, and that's not a good sign.
It may sound amazing to people today, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were considered by - how can I put it? - the sort of opinion-making tastemakers and everything to be 'off the scale as sentimental.'
The next few years are going to be horrendous in the UK. The last thing we need is a Somali pirate-style raid on the few wealth creators who still dare to navigate Britain's gale-force waters.
Nobody ever thinks that the work they're going to do could ever be bigger than the one they do before, especially if you're lucky enough like I had to have such a huge thing as 'Phantom' was.
