To be honest, I'm not really prepared to do a musical, simply because I think I have a pretty atrocious voice.
I want to work on projects that I feel passionate about and do things that are fun and challenging. I would love to do a live musical. I'm not interested in doing the same thing over and over or the fame and exposure that comes with it. When people keep doing that, they just end up doing the same dumb stuff again and again.
Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.
Hollywood producers aren't going to say, 'Get me that swearing, grey-haired, headless chicken. We need him for our new 'High School Musical' movie!'
Playing live is everything. Sometimes being on the road is hard, and it's a lot of work, and tiring. From a musical point of view, you improve all the time. Not only that, but you learn how to deal with people and deal with energy in a live setting.
I think your teenage years define your musical roots forever. You're always looking for a theme for your high school years.
As a kid growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, all I wanted to do was be on Broadway in a musical. 'Spring Awakening' kind of answered all of my questions and fulfilled all of my dreams - beyond my wildest dreams.
I had trouble fitting in, in a musical sense. A lot of drummers get sidetracked by the instrument. It can engulf you.
Doing a musical is not just acting. It's total theater. When you have to justify the enormous projection of energy it takes to just go into song and dance, you realized why it's such a humbling experience every time you go into a show.
I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities.
I come from a very musical family. My dad taught me to play guitar. I play violin and drums as well. Violin, I started in elementary school. Drums actually came when I was in a program called 'Rock Star,' which was really awesome. We were doing a song by the Ramones, so I thought, 'Why not play the drums?'
Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.'
Thinking back on it, I've been in this business since I was 3, and I grew up in musical theater, so I was raised and surrounded by gay men and gay women. I was hardly around anyone straight.
I have really musical parents, and my dad was always encouraging, but the desire to get onstage and perform really did come from me. I'd never push my future children.
My mother - who's from Iowa - owns and runs her own day-care centre, while my father's a developer. And my musical influences, I think, came from my father's side of the family.
I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.
Musical theatre is something that I always wanted to be a part of, and my first ever role on the West End as Joseph in 'Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat' gave me a taste for it.
Innocent parents might have thought that a musical cartoon version of a fairy tale would be a child's ideal introduction to movie magic. Yet Walt Disney taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones.
I always have plans to return to the stage. I leave myself very open. I think what would be more likely is if I did a limited run of something, whether it be a play or a musical.
I was heavily involved in musical theater.
It just tends to be that the grass is always greener. If I'm doing a movie, I suddenly think, 'Oh God, I wish I could just get a play script I could get my teeth into.' If I'm doing eight shows a week in a West End musical, I think, 'God, how lovely it would be to be in a TV series right now.'
I combine aspects of many styles of music and create my own musical forms by way of electronic instruments.
Usually, I think you have most of your musical influences locked down by the time you're 16.
Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.
Some musical directors have more chutzpah. They pick up the phone and talk people into giving. I prefer to call and say 'thank you' after the money has been contributed.
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.
You went to your first Broadway play or musical at some point, right? Come to opera.
I'd like to make a film musical. That's really my dream.
I don't want to work on a musical if I'm not the lyricist.
It's not difficult getting into the charts in Sweden. It's a very different musical climate, and in a very good way, I think, because artists like Jose Gonzalez or The Knife can actually get on the charts.
I used almost every penny I ever made to build recording studios in every city I lived in. I don't have much to show for all the TV money except a lot of musical gear and a lot of songs.
Just coming from a musical family, I was always surrounded by it. On the car rides to school, my mom loved playing A Tribe Called Quest and the Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' and then my dad was listening to a lot of Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder.
I wouldn't say I was bullied per se, but I did get a lot of unwanted attention because I was musical and stood out. In school you don't want to stand out; you want to blend in.
Musical theatre is now a worldwide conversation.
