Art & Creativity Quote by Elaine Paige

You can hear the early skepticism hiding inside the politeness. Paige remembers Tim Rice pitching what would become Chess, and the “pretty wild idea” isn’t just about star power; it’s about category panic. In the late 70s and early 80s, “pop writers” was still a faintly dismissive label in theater circles, shorthand for catchy but lightweight, commercial but not “serious.” Paige’s line captures that prejudice in real time, before it became retroactively inevitable that ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus could write something as musically sophisticated as a stage score.

The quote works because it’s a backstage origin story that exposes how cultural hierarchies police the borders of “legitimate” art. Paige isn’t sneering at ABBA; she’s acknowledging the industry’s default assumptions, including her own. That “obviously” is doing a lot of work: it signals that the gatekeeping wasn’t even debated, it was ambient.

There’s also an undercurrent of excitement. Rice’s ambition reads as audacious: take the mass-audience melodic instincts of pop and fuse them with the dramaturgical heft of musical theater. Paige, a performer who straddled both worlds, becomes the perfect witness: she can appreciate why it sounded improbable and why it might actually work. In hindsight, the wildness is the point. Big musical revolutions often start as someone saying the quiet part out loud: what if we let the “wrong” people write the score?