“If in America we lowered our ticket prices on Broadway, audiences could make up their own minds and wouldn't have to rely on the New York Times as the critic to tell us what we think. I think we have a big problem on Broadway right now where Wall Street has hijacked Broadway. They're not in it for the love of the theater. I don't know anybody that goes to Broadway or goes in to theater period to make money. It isn't a money-making proposition. There can only be one 'Wicked' a decade really but we have a lot of Wall St. fat cats who are money-laundering on Broadway and when they don't get the reviews they want, they shut the play down. They're not showmen so they don't know how to run it or how to bring an audience in. You have to have the ingenuity to get beyond the reviews if they're bad. In the old days they would never let a critic tell them their show was a flop. They would find a way to outwit them.”
—Patti LuPone on BBC Radio 2
“All educations, we realized then, are not created equal. For Ryan and me, of Pahrump, Nev., just an hour from the city, the Vegas boy was a citizen of a planet we would never visit. What we didn’t know was that there were other, more distant planets that we could not even see. And those planets couldn’t see us, either. A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try. For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything. ”
—Claire Vaye Watkins in The New York Times on the subject of college recruiting.
Watkins was on the show a couple weeks ago talking about her childhood in Nevada and writing. You can listen here.
