Daily Inspiration Quote by Randal Kleiser

Kleiser’s line reads like a pragmatic memo from someone who knows the musical isn’t a museum piece, it’s a delivery system. The key word is “now”: he’s not arguing that audiences have gotten worse or dumber, but that the contract between performer and viewer has changed. A musical only “works” when its heightened emotions feel native to the era’s pacing, vernacular, and media habits. Otherwise the genre’s central risk kicks in: people stop experiencing songs as narrative and start seeing them as interruptions.

The intent is quietly polemical. Kleiser frames “a musical now” as a problem of design, not devotion. That’s director-brain: the musical is a machine whose components (sound, choreography, editing, performance style) have to be rebuilt to fit contemporary attention spans and taste cultures shaped by MTV-era montage, pop production, and a screen-first relationship to performance. His own career context matters here: coming out of the late-70s/80s moment when Grease and its aftershocks helped repackage nostalgia with slick modern energy, he’s speaking from the era that proved reinvention could be box-office logic, not heresy.

The subtext is a challenge to purists who treat the Broadway grammar as sacred. Kleiser implies that style isn’t decorative; it’s the bridge that makes sincerity legible without tipping into camp (unless you mean to). “Developed” also suggests labor and experimentation, not simply borrowing current pop trends. He’s advocating evolution with intention: if the musical wants to stay alive, it has to speak fluent present tense, not just sing in borrowed past perfect.