I started out doing theater in N.Y.C.
I had been on this improv team at this really great improv theater. It's called iO now. It used to be called Improv Olympic. They have showcases for Lorne Michaels and other writers and people who work at 'SNL' usually about once a year, although I don't know if it always happens.
The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it's not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you're supposed to do - be truthful to scene - and if it's not funny, I'm telling you that no one's gonna care.
I did Alan Ball's 'Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,' and then he put me in 'American Beauty.' Everything started to happen from all the years I put into the theater in New York City, and working, and having great parents who supported me through that.
Look at the shows that are really successful on Broadway. They're musicals. They're things that a woman will pick out the tickets for, or a man will buy the tickets with a woman in mind. It's a date. It's boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife. That's what the theater in New York has become.
I did see one Tyler Perry movie in the theater. My friends and I went to see, I believe it was, 'Why Did I Get Married?'
My dad's an artist, and my grandfather paints - he's not a painter; my grandfather's a butcher - but he does a lot of crafts, stained glass, painting, that stuff. There is art in our family, and I was an art major in college along with being a theater major.
My dad was a theater actor, so he had an agent, and he brought me into his agency when I was maybe four years old. That was how I started. I started modeling, and it progressed from there.
I majored in theater, so I'd love to get back on a stage.
The movie that really 'did it for me' was 'All About Eve.' The backstage feeling, the authenticity, the passion those people had for their lives in the theater. I must say, the movie 'All About Eve,' what a great movie! 'All About Eve' had a profound effect on my life.
I would like, if I can, to broaden the possibilities of the musical theater. I think there's a better 'Oklahoma!' someplace, a better 'West Side Story.' And I'd like to be mixed up in it.
Theater is there to search for questions. It doesn't give you instructions.
I think I'm kind of attracted to the material more than the medium. I'm not opposed to doing a television show, though. I actually think there are a couple of good ones. And there is some terrible theater. Film is a very different kind of acting.
I come from musical theater, and a lot of musical theater is about accepting fantasy. I think it is more about just being open and accepting.
I started working in New York City as an actor and did many plays. I did regional theater, smaller theaters, children's theater.
It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.
Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.
I did choir, soccer, some theater. The only weird thing about my life was that I was playing honky-tonks on the weekends.
My first wife was a theater person.
I was in New York. I had been doing theater for many years, and then I got hired to a little part - they weren't calling it an extra, but I didn't have lines. It was a 'featured' part.
I was living in Evanston, Illinois and I was taking theater classes down the street, and our theater school was kind of affiliated with an agency, and so I went on one audition for whatever that movie was, 'My Stepmother is an Alien' or whatever it was, and 'Roseanne' was my second audition.
Celebrities in general are pretty democratic, just being in the theater. Plus, I'm from Chicago. But Obama's sensible... he's just a reasonable, sensible human being.
I'd feel bad if I had you come into a theater and you leave feeling ripped off.
I wanted to do dance with the same seriousness as art was done and acknowledged, not with the entertainment factor that is always connected to theater and film.
Theater has given me a different perspective on the way I approach films.
There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.
By the time 'Buffy' finished its Bay Area theatrical run - including a two-month stint at the dollar theater - I had seen the movie well over three dozen times. I was in love.
You always hear actors say, 'Theater is my first love,' and it is. It's a time when you really get to do what you do, and there's not a lot of waiting around and interruption and not a lot of money involved - sometimes money really clouds the waters of creativity.
We were always in church, and always singing, so once I realized that music was something that I had a knack for, I sort of latched onto it, and it helped give me an identity and figure out who I was as a person. It informed my way into theater, which informed my way into television.
Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.
Any increase in surveillance of marginalized communities for the sake of security theater have expanded the cycle of criminalization that queer people - especially queer people of color - are forced to navigate.
Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.
For fun, I love to play the drums... poorly. I have a band, a bunch of theater nerds - we got together, and we're like, 'Let's play rock music for three hours and never take breaks.' We call ourselves The U.S. Open.
I love music, singing, and playing piano (though I'm not very good). And I adore musical theater.
I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.
I started in theatre. I went to the Boston Conservatory and majored in musical theater.
