TT: Almanac

INTERVIEWER: You’ve said that one of the things you like about theater is that it’s a collaborative art and that you in a sense have a family. Again, to the layperson, it’s amazing, with all those people involved, that a musical ever gets on. In your experience as a collaborator in the process, when it works, what makes it successful?
SONDHEIM: The answer is so obvious that it will not seem like an answer. You have to be sure that you’re writing the same show. That’s something that I didn’t discover about [A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum] until too late. We weren’t writing the same show, even after we’d spent the better part of four years on it. They were writing a certain kind of show, and I was writing a certain kind of score, and none of us recognized that they were slightly different. I learned from that, and so the preliminary discussions for any show I do with my collaborators are to be sure that we’re writing the same show. That’s what makes it work.
Stephen Sondheim (quoted in Jackson R. Bryer and Richard A. Davison, The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators)