[With his lyrics,] you expect him to take a right and he takes a left. He does that with melodies as well. And actually, when you’re learning the music — and I’m sure I can speak for every actor who’s learned a Sondheim song — you’re secretly cursing Stephen Sondheim. Because it’s so damn hard to learn his music.

— Danny Burstein on Stephen Sondheim

From the Archives: Bernadette Peters

Music For Your Morning: NPRMusic is streaming the new cast recording of Follies. [added bonus: Danny Burstein will be on Fresh Air next Monday!]

Stephen Colbert on performing in Sondheim’s Company: “I tell a lot of young performers, ‘Go get in trouble. Go commit yourself to something you’re not sure you can do. And I followed my own advice. It was something I desperately wanted to do — not as a career — but an invitation I knew I couldn’t refuse and yet had no sense of whether or not I could do it. And that is trouble — but it was all so joyful. I’m very grateful to Mr. Sondheim that he got me in such trouble.” [complete Colbert interview here]

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone talk to Terry Gross about their hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon: “I don’t think anybody would want to see a two-hour-long Mormon-bashing, and we wouldn’t want to see that either. We love the goofiness of Mormon stories. Some of them are incredulous, and we loved almost all the Mormons that we had ever met. So this was sort of this conundrum that we like to talk about — we think what they believe is really, really ridiculous, and yet they seem like pretty happy people.” [full interview here]

Tomorrow: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, on The Book of Mormon musical. 

Previously: Trey Parker and Matt Stone: Celebrating 14 Years of Fart Jokes

Fresh Air remembers playwright Arthur Laurents (center) who died on Thursday. Laurents wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story. In 1990, he explained to Terry Gross how the original pitch for West Side Story was a bit…different: “It was about a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy in New York over Easter and Passover. And I wanted no part of it. And then several years passed and I happened to be in California and Lenny Bernstein was in California. By that time, juvenile delinquent gangs had come into being … That’s where the idea came from — the front page. And then Lenny and I called Jerry and said, ‘We’re ready to go.’”