Life & Wisdom Quote by Hal Price

Hal Price is arguing against a particular kind of creative cowardice: the industry habit of treating audiences like a data problem. The line has the cadence of backstage frustration, but it lands because it flips the most common producer logic on its head. People keep “trying to figure out what the public wants,” as if mass taste is fickle, shallow, and best managed through focus groups and familiar IP. Price’s punch is that this anxiety is self-fulfilling. When you make only what you assume people will safely buy, you train them to want only what you keep serving.

“Dangerous” and “courageous” are doing double duty. On the surface, he’s calling for risk: themes that complicate, music that’s weirder, stories that don’t resolve into applause-ready uplift. Underneath, he’s indicting a system that rewards risk management over artistry - a Broadway ecosystem where the financial stakes encourage mimicry, and where “marketability” becomes a polite synonym for pre-chewed.

The subtext is less romantic than it sounds. Price isn’t claiming audiences are inherently noble; he’s saying audiences respond to craft when it’s actually offered to them. “The public very often wants what’s good” is a quiet rebuke to the gatekeepers who blame spectators for their own blandness. It’s also a strategic argument: daring work isn’t just ethically preferable, it can be commercially smart, because appetite is shaped by ambition.