Politics & Power Quote by Carlisle Floyd

It reads like reassurance, but you can hear the exasperation under the melody. Carlisle Floyd is pushing back against the cozy industry alibi that American audiences only want fluff: lighter plots, safer tones, the musical-theater equivalent of junk food. His claim is bluntly democratic: the audience isn’t the problem. The gatekeepers are.

The intent is strategic as much as aesthetic. Floyd isn’t begging for “high art” tolerance; he’s making a producer’s argument dressed as an artist’s conviction. Give people seriousness plus craft - “well produced,” “dramatically gripping,” “wonderfully acted” - and they’ll show up. Notice the conditional stack. He doesn’t romanticize the public as naturally virtuous; he insists the work has to earn its gravity. Seriousness alone won’t do it. Seriousness executed with theatrical competence will.

The subtext lands in the American cultural chip on the shoulder: a country that still treats opera and ambitious music theater as imported luxuries, while Broadway economics reward predictability. Floyd, a major American opera composer who wrote in a vernacular idiom (think Susannah), is arguing for an indigenous seriousness that doesn’t apologize for itself. He’s also implying that “audience taste” is often a story told by institutions to justify risk aversion.

Context matters: late-20th-century American music theater increasingly split into blockbuster spectacle and niche experimental work, with a shrinking middle ground for big feelings and big ideas executed at a high level. Floyd is calling for that middle to be rebuilt - not by lecturing audiences, but by respecting them enough to give them something worth responding to.