My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
You would be amazed at the pompadour that I was rocking in the first job I had on the soap opera called 'Loving,' my first contract job.
'Prima Donna' is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.
When you have the cast, the sets, the lights, an opera takes on its own life. I'm not one of those directors who marches in with a set of plans.
It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
You hear about Broadway your whole life, and I learned what it meant to work on Broadway in 'The Phantom of the Opera.'
In Peru, there is no theatre that produces an annual opera season, and though there is one orchestra in Lima, it's always struggling to survive. We shouldn't have just one orchestra, we should have 15, we should have 50! And you should start to build this from the children.
I had opera training for three years, and I have three albums out. I also did a Broadway show. I'm an actor that sings, so it is in my blood. It is in my system.
I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I'd followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.
Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?
I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings.
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
To be a famously successful opera singer. I wanted that since I was eight.
I'd hate this to get out but I really like opera.
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
But Opera Man, I go, 'Oh, crap! Why didn't I think of that?' Because I could sing fake opera pretty good.
Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.
Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere.
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.
WWE is a company that produces fiction. It's a soap opera that runs 52 weeks a year without reruns.
I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic.
What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't.
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.
'Amores Perros' is rock, '21 Grams' is jazz, 'Babel' is an opera, and 'Biutiful' is a requiem.
I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old, I was imitating the singers; later I studied opera. But we also got Western television and radio, from the Americans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hippie and gave flowers to policemen. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for London, I became a punk.
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
