Jeff Britting Quotes

#1. After each performance of an Austin Shakespeare production, audiences are invited to stay for a ten-minute discussion of the work. And this tradition continues in our New York run.

Jeff Britting

#2. I think a successful adaptation rises or falls on the work presented. If people need to read the book to understand the play, I didn't complete the job.

Jeff Britting

#3. Basically, I composed the musical structure in one pass. The rest was editing and small adjustments. And when the play was read by actors with the music, the sequence timed-out perfectly.

Jeff Britting

#4. Sometimes, I stood at the front of the E train, watching the tunnel ahead, imagining what Anthem would look like on stage.

Jeff Britting

#5. If Anthem finds an audience in New York City, my hope would be to see the play transferred to a commercial theatre for an open-ended run.

Jeff Britting

#6. I certainly did my best to bring the story [Anthem] to life in another medium.

Jeff Britting

#7. Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."

Jeff Britting

#8. In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem.

Jeff Britting

#9. Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

Jeff Britting

#10. Who can I marry? Where can I live? What kind of career can I achieve? These are just some of the stories breaking with Anthem-like implications. And the ideas crushing the individual are all around us, chipping away at us constantly.

Jeff Britting

#11. I always thought the story [Anthem] would work in three dimensions - and studying that cut material was very useful.

Jeff Britting

#12. Music and text have several commonalities, and one is meter and rhythm. Both spoken word and music have certain regularities, and they can be sub-divided rhythmically.

Jeff Britting

#13. I really enjoy fusing text and music.

Jeff Britting

#14. Most of Ayn Rand's major characters are already formed at the start of the stories.

Jeff Britting

#15. Each day, I read the New York Times before leaving for the theater. And I have this standing assignment: connect the world of Anthem to the late breaking events of the day.

Jeff Britting

#16. I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays.

Jeff Britting

#17. After I write a sequence, I just open the script and then sit at the piano keyboard and "play" the script. (And because I also draw and paint, sometimes I sketch out the action as well.)

Jeff Britting

#18. Actually, one Anthem cue is a good example of the process. There is a four-minute sequence of music in Anthem, which underscores a prison sequence, and it lines up with five different, smaller scenes within one large scene.

Jeff Britting