[on what later became "Lady in the Dark"]
Kurt Weill and I sat at a table in a little midtown [Manhattan] restaurant and told each other vehemently why we should not write a musical comedy. We were both completely uninterested in doing a show for the sake of doing a show, in Broadway parlance, and the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage held no interest for either of us . . . We discovered the kind of show we both definitely DID want to do, a show in which the music carried forward the essential story and was not imposed upon the architecture of the play.