Art & Creativity Quote by Neil Tennant

There is a quiet burn in Tennant's phrasing: "We thought it would be great" sounds casual, almost polite, but it's really a challenge issued with a grin. Coming from a Pet Shop Boy, the line carries the confidence of someone who watched pop evolve from disposable chart fodder into a sophisticated language of desire, irony, and mass intimacy. The intent isn't just to graft catchy hooks onto show tunes; it's to reclaim the genre's bloodstream.

The subtext is that musical theater, for all its cultural prestige, often treats contemporary pop as either a guilty pleasure or a costume it puts on for "relevance". Tennant flips that hierarchy. Pop is positioned as the native tongue of modern feeling: compressed, immediate, built for repetition and communal memory. If theater wants to speak to the present, it can't only borrow pop's surface (a beat here, a synth there). It has to absorb pop's perspective: how it captures longing in three minutes, how it makes sincerity survive inside gloss, how it sells you an emotion while winking at the transaction.

Context matters: by the time Tennant is saying this, jukebox musicals and pop-driven scores are already a market. So the line reads as both invitation and critique. It's not "add pop" as a novelty; it's "put it back", implying it belonged there before Broadway became its own museum. The most pointed idea is that musical theater doesn't need to chase pop's audience. It needs to remember it once was pop's audience.