You know, they wanted to do a Broadway album and every show was kind of a bomb. There was no music at all.
I'm as anxious as any viewer would be to see what Temple is going to do next. All I know is that in the second half of the season, he's going to have more sexual tension developing. And it's a great cast - they're all Broadway actors except for me. I aspire to that.
After 'Rent,' I tried to make a record, and it didn't work out, and it was the Broadway community that welcomed me back. It's where I feel the most understood, most at home.
I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent.
I enjoyed the courtroom as just another stage but not so amusing as Broadway.
One of my favorite movies is 'Broadway Danny Rose.'
Initially, I wanted to be an ice skater, but then when I was 13 I saw Bye Bye Birdie, and that was it - I wanted to be on Broadway.
I watched Mark Rylance in the Broadway revival of 'La Bete,' and it knocked my socks off. The complete commitment, passion, and unbridled enjoyment in every moment of what he was doing was overwhelming.
My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.
I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.
I got to Broadway a year after I came to New York. I starred in 'Butterflies Are Free' and got a Tony for it. Right out of the gate. Maybe that's why I wasn't very gracious about it. I wasn't driven. And right after 'Butterflies Are Free', I got married and then started a family. I always wanted that.
I'm not gay, so I don't know much about Broadway musicals.
As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation.
'Tommy' was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. I was 14. It wasn't 'the show' that started that flame in me or anything, but it did excite me in a way no other show had. I'd never seen a show so brilliantly cast and directed.
When I did 'Grease,' I took good care of myself. I treated it like a job. I approached it very professionally because I wanted to make a good reputation and hopefully continue on in the Broadway community and continue to do shows.
I did the Broadway album unfortunately in a year when there were no hits.
I wanted to write for Broadway.
Going to Broadway - then to be invited to the Tonys - I really tap into what that feels like now to fulfill lifetime goals.
I want to toy around with producing a Broadway show.
'Birdman' is basically 'All About Eve' - the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate - reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn't be actor-ier.
I've met so many of my idols, but the one person that has eluded me is Bono. But because he's done 'Spider-Man,' I keep thinking maybe, through a Broadway connection, somehow our paths will eventually merge.
My goal was simply to be a working actress. I never imagined myself on Broadway.
Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.
All those days of waiting on tables until I could get a role on Broadway, all that time going to school taking lessons, and all those years of being a nobody following a dream-and now here it is.
Film is much more of a brand business, whereas on Broadway, you can do complete unknowns and have hits.
I've been reading scripts where they've been doing a lot of singing now, but within the dark, realistic story line. I would love, love, love, love to do that. But not a musical on Broadway, I don't have that kind of energy or stamina.
You can't make money on Broadway. You make nothing. You maybe make like $1,350 a week after you pay out all the producers.
I loved being on Broadway, but performing has become exhausting, and I just don't want to live in New York anymore. I'm just sick of the competition in New York, the feeling that I always have to rehearse to keep up my performance. I don't feel like rehearsing, even though it should be my favorite thing in the world to do.
After that, I started going downtown and doing a lot of theater shows in Chicago. When you go downtown there, it's like you're in New York, it's like going to Broadway.
There is one thing I should say, and it's important: Young Broadway singers and anybody who is an orator of any kind - lawyers who have to speak in court or pastors or anyone who has a lot of stress on their vocal cords: You should do the maintenance. You should do whatever it takes to feel fresh and good.
The only thing I have never done is a Broadway play. I'm not sure I have the discipline necessary to do a Broadway play. I know it holds a fascination for certain actors.
When you're doing a Broadway show, you have no free time.
When I had a record deal in the '90s, that was my dream - to make an album like Barbra Streisand's Broadway album - and they laughed me out of the room. Broadway wasn't cool. But artists like Michael Buble and Josh Groban have brought the classic genre back to the forefront, so I'm trying to find my way inside that market.
I got the regular call, that they were doing a Broadway musical of Hairspray, and would I come and audition. I was familiar with the movie, because at the time it came out my lover wrote for Premiere magazine, and we had to see everything.
There's something about that relationship between actor and audience. Whether you get it on Broadway or in a fine local playhouse, there's no greater drug. Every time I get to do TV, film and a play in the same year, it's my dream come true.
Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.
