Broadway Quotes by Michael Musto, Clay Aiken, Kenny Leon, Robert Gottlieb, John Benjamin Hickey, Mike Birbiglia and many others.
In ’75, the year both A Chorus Line and Chicago hit Broadway, my head spun around and I became the ultimate theater queen for life.
I had the greatest time on Broadway and made friends I never expected to make!
Broadway is the same as Hollywood. Every few years we say we reached the mountaintop, then we take two steps back.
Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this – because there was nothing like this on Broadway.
I remember when I was doing The Crucible on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, Lets make sure we remember this.
I love Broadway shows.
The first big lead that I had on Broadway was in a show called La Strada.
My dream of dreams is to write Broadway musicals. All of this Twitter and TV writing is just a day job.
In New York, I get people coming up to me because ‘The History Boys’ was such a hit on Broadway, and they show the film all the time on cable over there, so people recognise you.
There’s a lot of pressure on Broadway. There’s this feeling that the show has to be a commercial success and the producers have to make their money back and Tonys and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays.
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.
If you can get tickets, a show on Broadway is worth the effort and expense.
If you look back throughout the history of Broadway, there’s always been periods where writers and producers have delivered the kind of things that people want to see, while at the same time pushing the form along.
I think Broadway is good for sharpening your skills. It’s the best for really reaching the zenith of your talent. You go so far and reach the peak of it and you say, “Maybe this is the best performance I can do.”
I had never auditioned for Broadway – any play – and I was not familiar with what you’re supposed to do.
I am always in much better shape when I am doing a Broadway show because you have the eight shows a week to kind of keep the body clean and perfect in a sense, you know? For instance, I always eat much better when I am in a show because you can’t have dairy – for your voice.
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.
There is definitely that thing here a little where people are like ‘Oh that Broadway girl has come to Nashville’ and I’m like ‘Listen you guys, I was singing country before I even got a Broadway show. And I’m from Kentucky.’
I’m not really a ‘puppet’ person in particular; I think they are very theatrical, and I’ve found different uses for them in shows, but my true interest is in writing Broadway musicals.
I have felt for a long time that I want to return back to being a singer-songwriter for a period of time. I will go back to Broadway. But I want to make the right choices about why to go back and when I am ready to go back.
I learnt a lot from my Broadway experience, it was one of the most challenging things I will probably ever have to do in my entire life, because it was eight shows a week – live singing with really hard choreography – and the spontaneity, you don’t know what’s going to happen.
We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It’s the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.
I really enjoyed Eddie Bracken. He told me a great story. He did The Odd Couple on Broadway, replacing Art Carney, and he said, “Art Carney did it for six months and I did it for three years, and I don’t think anyone I’ve ever spoken to saw me. They all saw Art Carney.”
I did a couple of little Off-Broadway things, but my first Broadway show was A History Of The American Film, written by Chris Durang. Swoosie Kurtz was one of the stars. It was a wonderful show. It closed in 40 performances. I think it was kind of ahead of its time.
What about Broadway? Yes, I’m involved with a new musical based on ‘The Adams Family.’
If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it’s the worst stuff that’s mired in pop music.
I definitely want my career to continue to branch out. I’ve had the pleasure of working in different areas of entertainment, from being in the music business as a teenager in a girl group to doing Broadway.
I’d love to go back to Broadway; I’d love to do animation; I’d love to do hair and make-up campaigns because I love hair and makeup – and, I’d love to do film. I mean, there are a lot of doors I’d love to open up!
I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, ‘Oh, maybe if I’m lucky I’ll make it to Broadway by the time I’m 40!’
When I was growing up in the Isle of Man with ambitions of being a performer, I really wanted to go to see a Broadway show.
It’s disgusting that a Broadway show can’t try out anymore, that no matter where they are in the world, there is this massive dialogue going on between people damning or praising it.
I have always wanted to be on Broadway, whether on ice or on the boards.
I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mix tapes in the ’90s than I did in college. You’re learning about rise and fall and energy and tempo shifts. You’re showing off your taste and your references. You’re trying to be witty by – through placement of music you didn’t write.
I’d love to do Broadway some day. Before I started doing television I was just a primarily a stage actor, but I haven’t done it in a while.
My first big show in Denver was ‘Ruthless! The Musical.’ I played Tina Denmark at the Theatre on Broadway. It was my big break!
I remember my mom had a conversation with Sam Jackson about what she should do with our careers and what the next step should be; I was eight and my brother was nine. He said, “You need to get them on Broadway.”
I did my first Broadway play, ‘The Vertical Hour,’ in 2006, with Julianne Moore, who’s always been one of my favorite actresses. My scene was with her, so it was nerve-racking.
Being in front of a live audience again. I get that in my concerts but there’s nothing like being on Broadway.
I’d love to do something on Broadway. I’d love to spend some time in New York.
I auditioned for Julliard because I wanted to live in New York, and I wanted to be on Broadway at the time. Julliard seemed like right way to get there.
You thought the stage, you thought Broadway: that was the pot at the end of the rainbow. The idea of being in Hollywood was like going to the Moon or Mars.
I absolutely loved my stint on Broadway in ‘Hairspray.’
I’m so tired of stories starting, ‘Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.’ You’ve got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven’s sake. Everybody doesn’t have to be an O. Henry.
I don’t like Tommy on Broadway at all. I like the music, I’m pleased with Pete’s success but I don’t like what they’ve done to it.
You know, they wanted to do a Broadway album and every show was kind of a bomb. There was no music at all.
The only thing I haven’t done as an actor, other than Thai puppet theater somewhere, is act on a Broadway stage.
Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times
The stuff that is done on Broadway is hardly theatre. It is part magic show, part rock concert, and part conjuring things.
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 don’t go to that many Broadway shows, so I can’t really say anything.
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 would like there to be gender equity. I would like the Broadway season to reflect sort of the demographic of the country.
The musicals on Broadway have not necessarily been true musical theater. I’m speaking generally, of course: I saw ‘Spring Awakening,’ and I was completely inspired by that.
My last show that I did on Broadway was – I hate to say this, but – ‘Cats.’ There you go. So I was doing ‘Cats’ on Broadway, and I injured my back. It was a really tough show.
‘Hairspray’ was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the ‘Lion King’ circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.
I’ve got all these great broads in me, all these character women. I was playing a torn-down stripper at twenty-five on Broadway, and now I fit the shoes.
I went to a really small school, and it had a really small theater department. They didn’t talk about Broadway. I learned about it through watching the Tony Awards.
If you want to be a theater actor, where do you live now? Young actors struggle on a Broadway salary. A lot of them live in shoe boxes; some of them are literally three to a shoebox. New York has gotten prohibitively expensive.
I would love to be an amazing singer. I take voice lessons. It’s good to have as a dancer – to be able to sing and act, too, because for a Broadway show or musical, you have to be able to do everything.
I was in 27 Broadway plays in a row as a kid, and in between, I learned how to play the horses from the stagehands.
Broadway performers are the best-trained people on the planet.
I’ve just been more interested in doing film right now and I don’t want to go away from my family for six months, which was what I would have had to have done if I did the play on Broadway.
You know, things kind of happen organically and, you know, Broadway sort of happened out of a career in performing and – which happened out of practicing piano when I was a kid.
I directed this movie ‘Jewtopia’ that was based on a show I wrote which played Off Broadway for a number of years. I was trapped in ‘Jewtopia’; it wasn’t the film I wanted to make.
This film “Phantom” takes everything that’s wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.
Mr. Brooks and I have been friends forever. He is in seventh heaven with his new success on Broadway.
The first Broadway show I ever heard was the recording of Carousel, and it was a very vivid experience.
It’s a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of “The Elephant Man” and just recently collaborated on “Lazarus,” an off-Broadway musical that’s a sequel to his 1976 role in the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth.”
I have to say, speaking from experience, just because an actor starts out in a role in the workshop, they won’t necessarily play it when it goes to Broadway.
All my roots are Broadway. I got my Equity Card doing a Broadway show, and my first love is theater.
The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks, I mean just out and out crooks. And the next generation had a little more finesse. But I mean those first wave of people, you know, definitely would take all your money, no doubt about it.
You have to decide when it is time to move on. I was dancing on Broadway for many years. Then everyone was either getting injured or retiring and I was dancing with younger dancers.
Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I’m bored with a play, if I’m revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I’m going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.
In a Broadway musical, a scene sometimes breaks into a song and vice versa.
I’d like to one day be able to say, ‘I was in more than one play on Broadway.’
I could see no position to say, ‘I’m going to make a living as a writer.’ But I went to classes for it; I read every play in ‘Theater’ magazine. I saw the second acts of everything on Broadway – I had a job as a CBS usher in New York City, and on my way home every night, I’d see what shows I could get into.
The beauty of Broadway is that if I’m 60 or 70 years old, if they’ll accept me back, I can go back. So I think for right now I’m going to focus on the music–it’s the new baby–and see how it’s going to work out, and then maybe in a few years maybe I’ll go back.
‘American Psycho’ reminds me of my track in ‘Tommy,’ my first Broadway show. It’s similar conceptually and has that rock n’ roll streak.
It’s lovely that the Hollywood stars are crossing over to Broadway…. There used to be such a dividing line in the country between Hollywood and the theatre and that’s just melting away. It’s just wonderful right now!
I began modeling in N.Y. and doing commercials. That led to regional theatre and then Broadway and then movies.
There’s something about being a part of Broadway and going backstage. You know, like when I go to see a show now and going backstage and saying “Hi” to the cast. It’s so thrilling. It’s so beyond my wildest dreams from when I was a kid.
What a turnaround in sentiment ‘Glee’ exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.
I found an agent midway through my year-long run at ‘Grease’ and just started to audition. I fortunately booked ‘South Pacific’ six months after ‘Grease’ was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing.
What better way is there to raise money for such an important organization like Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS than by celebrating all types of bodies, all types of relationships, and just acceptance overall?
When I was on Broadway, my most recent Broadway show was ‘Spring Awakening,’ and every night I did a topless scene.
I was doing a Broadway play, and I was really new to this business. The Broadway play was my first job, literally. The play next door was a musical called Falsettos. The director got hired to direct this Michael J. Fox movie and was looking for a kid who could play brash and salty and mean [in Life With Mikey].
I did do Broadway for a little less than a year and realized quickly I don’t have a passion for it and, more importantly, I don’t have a talent in it.
I have always loved Broadway.
To be an English person in my 20s, doing a Broadway show – it’s one of the mountains I wanted to climb.
It’s always a thrill to walk through a Broadway stage door.
In graduate school, Aubrey Berg at the Cincinnati Conservatory gave me the chance to perform with the best in the country in Broadway caliber productions.
If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.
Secretly, I’m in awe of Broadway performers. I would love to perform at that level. I love the exchange with the audience. I love being able to sing and dance to express your emotions and the community and friendships that are formed when working on a theater piece.
There’s no better feeling than being on a Broadway stage for me.
The Broadway community means the world. That goes for the actors, that goes for the crew, the producers, the writers, and most importantly, that goes for the fans. The Broadway community is one that I will always hold very near and very dear to me.
I’m not a person who believes that Broadway is the only place. I think there’s lots of work that goes on outside of Broadway and outside of New York that’s better than anything Broadway has ever seen. But, it’s historically the place. It’s one of the centers of the universe, in many ways.
My long-term goal is to play a drag role or a female role in a Broadway production.
Although the ‘New York Times’ annually declares that Broadway is on its deathbed, news of its demise is greatly exaggerated. There’s a lot of life yet in the old tart.
I was a Hollywood musical fan as a kid, and I know how rare it is for someone who originates the Broadway role to get to then do it on screen.
My father is a South African actor who danced in broadway musicals for ‘Lion King.’
I love New York. I’m working on Broadway, and it’s a great way for me to get my feet wet in acting and a great way to season yourself as a performer.
Broadway is really my life.
Motion pictures are a director’s medium. Broadway is a writer’s medium. Television is a producer’s medium. I picked a medium I could control.
I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.
Some people get a Broadway show, and that’s their end game, and they want to sit there for as long as possible. And some people have other things they want to do with their life.
I’ll tell you what I think in general about people who want to make their Broadway debut that are not trained stage actors. Don’t they know, Broadway ain’t for sissies? It is a tough gig. You are responsible, physically, mentally, emotionally, for eight shows a week, at the top of your game. It’s not easy.
I didn’t see any Broadway till I was in my late twenties.
I’d actually love to play Sonny in ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ now that it’s being adapted for Broadway. People don’t talk about that movie that much, but it’s really a beautiful gay love story.
I do an act, and I’ve been doing an act for 50 years. I do a variety show, which is a musical comedy show. I do comedy, and I do singing, Broadway show tunes and different songs that I like. Been doing it for many, many years.
Broadway’s not what it used to be.
You can’t do four movies and be good to everybody and be flying all night and shooting all day with a different wig and then be going to sing on Broadway without feeling a little tired. You endlessly feel you’re letting somebody down.
If you’re a child, and you’re on Broadway, you automatically know every other child in a production.
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.
When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, auditioning for Broadway was my dream.
When we were shooting ‘Oz,’ my wife was doing ‘Beauty and the Beast’ on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.
I would love to do Broadway again.
I think we sublimated our Broadway desires by doing theater in Hollywood – not on stage but by doing the movies of ‘Chicago’ and ‘Hairspray’ and also musicals on TV. We did Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Annie.’ Even ‘Smash’ was like doing theater.
I was modeling since I was four and acting in commercials since I was five – this was when I was in New York. I then moved to LA when I was 16… but before that I had done a play on Broadway.
When you rehearse a Broadway show, you get two months of rehearsal, while in TV, it’s a much shorter process.
I think every show I do, whether I am doing eight shows a week of a Broadway show… I think, “that’s a show I’ll never get back”… I go home at night and I think to myself, “that was my favorite”.
It was the first time that I was on Broadway, and I got to run as fast as I could to keep up. And I loved it!
When I was little, I saw the play ‘Les Miserables’ on Broadway, I thought it was the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
I played Tina Denmark in Ruthless the Musical when I was 9 at the Theatre on Broadway in Denver.
I hoped, hoped, that maybe I’d be lucky enough to do something on Broadway, in the chorus.
I certainly have dreams of being on a Broadway stage someday, if they’ll have me. I think I want to stay really open to whatever possibilities present themselves.
As soon as I saw ‘Chinglish’ on Broadway, I began to envision this smart and insightful cross-cultural comedy as a film.
On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.
I thought that I’d always just do Broadway, my original plan, but that was derailed.
I want a TV series, I’m gonna do some acting jobs, I’m gonna do some Broadway jobs, everything!
A ‘Looking’ musical would completely bring me back to Broadway. I would come back in a second.
I went to Hollywood to test for Martha Ivers and I thought I was going to play the part that Van Heflin played.But they wanted me to play the part of Barbara Stanwyck’s husband, so I played that. Then when I finished the movie, I went back to Broadway and did another flop.
I love Broadway. And, I listen to country music, which I think a lot of people find surprising.
There’s been talk of YES possibly doing something on Broadway in New York. People have approached me with that idea, and there are discussions about that.
I’d love to do Broadway or the West End. I’m sure doing eight shows a week is gruelling, but I did a lot of stage shows in Sydney and I love performing live.
I was so happy to be able to be a part of Broadway Bares and had the best time ever!
Ive been to London twice. I saw the Broadway show Billy Elliot there – phenomenal. I was crying through the entire thing.
I would love to do Broadway. That was my original aim, when I first started acting when I was 13. I wanted to do stage; I wanted to do musicals.
All forms are complex once you get to a really high level, and jazz and hip-hop are so connected. In hip-hop, you sample, while in jazz, you take Broadway tunes and turn them into something different. They’re both forms that repurpose other forms of music.
I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it’s a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I’m a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world!
In school, when we lived in New Jersey, we went to Broadway a lot, so I saw a lot of Broadway plays, and I just loved being able to see people play a different character and, you know, be able to be themselves at the end of the night. So, I’ve always wanted to do it.
I probably never would have been hired on Broadway had I not moved out to L.A. and pursued acting and film, which is sad, really.
I do Broadway because I refuse to succumb to the stereotypical things that Hollywood does to a performer.
There’s nothing more Broadway than ‘Hedwig.’ It’s very family-friendly. There’s innuendo and stuff, but not more than you’d see on TV.
My one ambition was to go to Broadway, and I never gave up on that dream.
Even with the success of ‘Once,’ I can’t think about making theater straight for Broadway. Too nerve-racking.
I think the first Broadway show that I saw was ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and that was in 5th or 6th grade. Our school would take bus trips up to see shows, and so it was on one of their bus trips that I got to see ‘Beauty and the Beast.’
A month before graduation I got an off-Broadway job. Then I did some commercials, including one for MCI. You can only see half of me, but it paid well. Thank God for commercials.
I never thought of myself as a Broadway actress. I’m not really a singer or a dancer.
I’ve always felt embraced by the Broadway community even before I felt like I earned it.
I started when I was in ‘The King and I’ when I was on Broadway when I was nine.
I was successfully hiding from the world on Broadway for about 25 years.
There’s just nothing funnier or crazier than that – doing your Broadway debut as Spider-Man in ‘Spider-Man’ the musical. It was, like, the last thing I could have ever possibly imagined happening. I mean, I would tell people I was playing Spider-Man, and people would just break out laughing because it was so ridiculous!
So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)
Since nobody upstages Rudolph Giuliani, his will be a Broadway-class show, perhaps his final bravura performance before November 2000, when he hopes to be turned out of the mayor’s office by virtue of his election to the United States Senate.
I started in the music business I was first introduced to 1650 Broadway, uh, which was in reality where everything happened in the ’60s.
The film world is always looking for great source material, and Broadway has traditionally and historically been a place to go.
I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you’re not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of ‘Beauty Queen,’ people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn’t really prepared for that level of attention.
Once I found out how much an Off-Off-Broadway actor makes, I was whoring myself out the next day.
For me, there’s nothing more valuable as an actor, or better way to learn, than getting to perform in front of a live audience, no matter where you are. Whether it’s on Broadway, in Florida, or doing a tour.
I was never much of a musical theater guy, but I have so much more respect for the art form, the physical exertion of doing eight shows on Broadway a week, I cannot even fathom it.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t.
I remember dreaming about it, about being on TV. I remember seeing Children of a Lesser God on Broadway. I was sitting in the second or third row, and I was just so blown away, and I walked out saying, вЂThat’s what I want to do.’
I was always daydreaming about singing in big productions on Broadway.
I want to do a big Broadway musical, at some point. I would love to do that. To do something there would be super-cool.
Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out–nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.
I’m not a singer or a dancer, my Broadway dreams are ridiculous.
The only stuff I don’t like are Broadway musicals. I hate them. I don’t even like to talk about it. I can’t bear musicals.
The first Broadway show I saw was when I was 11. I saw ‘Hair.
I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.
I went on a few auditions for Broadway musicals, and never stopped taking classes, but I didn’t take it seriously until I was out of college.
I was repeatedly told that there isn’t an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, ‘Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don’t do it?’ I said, ‘I think you’re wrong.’
Even if you’re lucky to have a play on Broadway like ‘Chinglish,’ you don’t necessarily earn enough off it to support the years it takes to get there.
I remember going on iTunes and ‘Hamilton’ was like the number one rap album, above like Fetty Wap, which is just impossible, like a Broadway cast album.
I want to be on the big stage. Broadway. I was there before.
I do ultimately wanna go back to Broadway and do live theater; I wanna act. But singing is my love. I feel like I’m sitting on a pot of gold.
My mom was always so supportive; she enabled me to pursue my dreams. I danced on Broadway as a kid, and she would never miss a show.
I started out doing musical theater specifically – I thought I would eventually move to New York and audition for stuff, and maybe wind up on Broadway or something. Well, that didn’t happen.
I play characters who are comfortable naked, but that’s something you work up to. I did a play off-Broadway in New York when I was in college. It was full-frontal nudity. It’s nerve-racking.
When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.
I would love to do Broadway. I dont think theres anything more amazing than theater. OK, Supergirl is number one. Maybe I could be Supergirl on Broadway That would be perfect.
I’ve had albums out since the 1970s. I was in a musical, ‘The Boy Friend,’ directed by Ken Russell, and I was on Broadway in ‘My One And Only’ with Tommy Tune, so I’ve always been a singer, but I suppose people think of my modelling more.
There was a perception that reality-show people are just mere personalities, that they don’t have real talent, and I worked real hard to change peoples’ minds, one show at a time, and proved a lot of people wrong. I’m proud I was the first to do that for ‘Idol’ on Broadway!
I then moved to LA when I was 16… but before that I had done a play on Broadway.
The most rewarding thing is being on Broadway. I went into Cabaret as a replacement and was really challenged beyond anything I could have imagined.
I was one of the ones in my generation who actually did connect with ‘The Wiz,’ even though it was not on Broadway or the movie wasn’t big anymore by the time I was of age to notice. But I was into it in middle school.
I played Pierre, a white Russian aristocrat, and my co-lead was Denee Benton. Two black leads playing not black people – it was an important moment for the Broadway community to say diversity is possible and it’s here.
The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.
I remember watching the Tony Awards as a young girl, thinking I would never get that far but, in my heart, wanting so badly to perform on Broadway and defy the expectations of my small town.
It’s probably my favorite part of my whole showbiz experience, is Broadway. The community of Broadway. That feeling that happens every night.
I’ve really had a great career. It’s been part fortune and part my own choices that steered my own career into playing the great roles that I’ve played on stage in Australia and at the National and West End in London and on Broadway.
I have very important phone messages that will be playing Broadway. An evening of my tweets I think is going to be booked into the Golden Theatre.
I was modeling since I was four and acting in commercials since I was five- this was when I was in New York. I then moved to LA when I was 16…but before that I had done a play on Broadway.
If you try to do a genuine rock musical, rock people will think you’re flaccid and Broadway audiences will think you’re too loud.
L.A., it’s nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps.
Over the years, I’ve had to learn to play. For example, when ‘Lennon’ was on Broadway, I learned my way around the guitar chords because originally we were all going to play the instruments without a band.
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.
Broadway was always sort of my trajectory before I found film and television – that would be really tremendous.
I can’t tell you the thrill and joy of when I was cast in my first Broadway show. Granted, it was ‘Starlight Express’ and it was exhausting, but it was my first time on Broadway, and there was nothing like it.
Broadway isn’t a very big career move. There’s no money in it and it doesn’t mean anything to your career. It’s just a nice little jewel in the crown.
I think coming East and doing something like Broadway would probably be a good career move.
When I did ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie,’ it was almost every ‘first’ I could have imagined: I dreamt someday being on Broadway, and then dreamt someday playing a lead on Broadway, and then dreamt someday of getting to originate a role, and then getting a Tony nomination. It all happened at once. I was just terrified.
When I moved to New York, I didn’t know how much improv and comedy would play into my life. I thought I was going to do theater and Broadway and stuff.
During the winter of 2013, we were running ‘Comet’ up in midtown – as opposed to downtown – and across the street in the Standard, and that was, like, our third time going at it, from Ars Nova to downtown to near Broadway. We weren’t on Broadway. We were near Broadway, as we said.
To be rapping in a musical on Broadway is just – that sentence doesn’t make any sense in my brain.
They can’t hurt me. Sure, they can crush you and kill you. They can lay you out on 42nd and Broadway and put hoses on you and flush you in the sewers and put you on the subway and carry you out to Coney island and bury you on the Ferris wheel. But I refuse to sit here and worry about dying.
More people saw the pilot of ‘Glee’ than saw me in my entire 10-year career on Broadway.
Having spent time on the Broadway stage definitely helps one’s confidence in terms of feeling just validated in that world. Most people only know my voice as a country artist.
I coach young people. I have a group called BTP – Broadway Theatre Project.
Maybe I could be Supergirl on Broadway! That would be perfect.
Every actor tries to come to Broadway be it Richard Burton, Marlon Brando or Liz Taylor or Shirley McClain.
I don’t think a solo album is me. I don’t consider my voice to be that kind of a voice. Not that I don’t love singing, but Broadway was my original dream. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.
I was occasionally getting calls for some things. But I would say, 22 to 29 was a lot of scuffling. Hoping to get called for bad wedding gigs and I did do an off-Broadway show for about 15 months.
It takes a damn village to get a show on Broadway!
I know about lots of things that have nothing to do with being Asian, that you would never guess from looking at me. I know all about musical theater. I could go on ‘Jeopardy!’ and knock off the whole Broadway show tunes category. Also the whole Bible stories category.
Everything I did growing up was with that as the real goal – doing Broadway; doing theatre. That was always the big thrill for me.
I’m unable to do the thing that Broadway actors do in plays, sometimes for years. The same exact blocking, the same exact lines. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that. Every night I’m looking for ways to try something else.
I definitely take influences from my idols David Bowie and Billy Joel. I’ve combined them with the Frankie Grande-isms that I’ve cultivated over singing every night for two shows a week for four years on Broadway.
I went to School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, and we had a bunch of singing classes. My first job in New York was an Off-Broadway musical.
When I got out of the Army, I started writing the usual ‘Catcher in the Rye’ imitations, and then I wrote something that was done Off-Off Broadway in a theater. It was called ‘What Else Is There?’ and it was four or five people playing missiles in a silo waiting to take off.
When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed.
I went to Boston University and got my BFA, and performed Off Broadway.
I don’t stop. It’s my nature. People have to tell me to slow down. I plan on playing every role on Broadway. I want to do ‘Evita.’ I want to do ‘Sweeney Todd’ with Chris Colfer. We want to do ‘Wicked.’ I’ll be Elphaba and he wants to play ‘Guy-linda.’ I want to do movies, make music. ‘Glee’ is only the beginning.
I’ve done three Broadway shows; once the curtain goes up, that’s it. I mean, you prepare and you rehearse like crazy, but after opening night, the director’s not there anymore, you know. He gives you notes during previews after each performance, but opening night, you’re on your own.
At 21, my career took a comedic turn when I was cast in a new Broadway play called ‘Brooklyn Boy,’ by Donald Margulies, which was equal parts funny and sad. I realized that the more seriously I expressed my character’s feelings, the funnier the scene became.
Professional wrestling… is no different than a Broadway play except that in a Broadway play, actors are using dialogue to tell a story and establish their characters, while in WWE, they’re using a physical dialogue to tell their story and build their characters. That’s a very unique art; it really is.
We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
I’d love to do a Broadway show, but I can’t because of the style I sing.
I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.
I was in musicals. and I was in the choir when I was younger. Before I started writing my own songs, I thought I wanted to be on Broadway, but it was nothing I ever really pursued.
Many actors in films are willing to go to Broadway, and screenwriters are writing plays. It’s almost commonplace.
I started doing theatre, and that’s when I really fell in love with the profession; I learned a lot. It felt a bit weird to go from living in New York on Broadway to university, so I kept putting it off. Then, eventually, I had to give up the place.
I would like to initiate an initiative – the Broadway Annoying Audience Member Relocation Programme.
All of a sudden, I was a young kid in my early 20s, and I had a couple of Broadway shows to my credit.
Even when I did my Broadway show, I did 15 minutes no one had seen before, because that was the night that Michael Jackson protested about Al Sharpton bailing on him. I said, “Wow, if that man bails on you, this must be really a lost cause.”
Broadway is amazing because you’re performing for such an intimate group of people. You’re living in the moment and whatever happens happens, and you go on. You can’t say cut and redo it, you have to be on the whole time.
I’d like to think of myself as an ambassador for Broadway.
I’ve been working very hard off-off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway and doing little films and really sweating my butt off in tiny little black boxes.
I really did sneak into Broadway shows, starting when I was 12.
I understand people who boo us. It’s like going to Broadway show, you pay for your tickets and expect to be entertained. When you’re not, you have a right to complain.
I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.
Broadway is the actor’s Mt. Everest – but with more flattering frocks.
This power that I’m supposed to have over women was never noticed when I was a stage actor on Broadway. I don’t know when I got it. And by God, I can’t explain it.
I am almost famous in China, because I have that Broadway cachet.
Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the ’30s and ’40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we’ve ever had.
I thought it was all a flash in the pan. It wasn’t until Broadway came along that I felt I had really made it.
There are many Broadway songs that apply to moments on ‘Mad Men,’ and I sing them on set all the time.
If I had maintained my athletic fantasy, I probably would have ended up as a fat football coach somewhere in central Pennsylvania. I’m really glad I’m starring in a Broadway musical instead.
I remember doing Broadway, I started Broadway in 2005, and, of course, I sing two songs in the play, ‘Hairspray’.
I absolutely loved my stint on Broadway in Hairspray.
My aim is to bridge Broadway and the R&B world; and to bring all my Broadway experience to the R&B world; and one day, when I go back to Broadway, to bring some R&B to that.
I did my first Broadway show when I was nineteen years old – and to be able to say that I am still working with the incredible talents of all of the creative teams that I have been able to work with – that’s so special to me.
If you’d ever told me that my Broadway debut would be playing Spider-Man, I would have laughed in your face.
On Broadway, you are working with some incredible people, and they have great reasons for doing things the way they do.
New York. It’s home to opera, Broadway, museums, the ballet and orchestra – everything that I love. The most real people in the world live there.
I have seen Hollywood artistes like Al Pacino, Tom Cruise and Tim Burton doing theatre and Broadway shows. Cinema actors tend to go back to theatre because it gives them an opportunity to reinvent themselves.
The movie people would have nothing to do with me until they heard me speak in a Broadway play, then they all wanted to sign me for the silent movies.
I’m not denying that it’s exciting to have a play on Broadway.
I’m extraordinarily honored and proud when I am told that I am part of the Broadway community and part of the Broadway family. Because, Broadway is a family. And it doesn’t matter if you did one show or if you did fifty shows.
Broadway was weird.
I’m lucky to have worked in theater all over the world, but there’s something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, they’re educated. They go in ready and they’re up for it, they’re up for the party. It’s a whole different atmosphere.
The phone rings and there’s another Broadway show or another TV series or a movie. That’s the gamble you take.
The actual cheerleaders in our film are all Broadway dancers.
I really hope for more Broadway. I didn’t think I was going to love it this much. I would love to stay here.
All the lights on Broadway don’t amount to an acre of green.
If I was on Broadway, I would want to do anything Vaudeville or a biopic.
I have always wanted to do Broadway, my whole life, but I never knew I’d actually make it – it’s a dream; it’s never been in the realm of possibility. So to be doing ‘Hello Dolly!,’ it’s not just Broadway, but it’s the most joyful, sort of classic Broadway experience with the most extraordinary company.
When a man and a woman see each other and like each other they ought to come together – wham – like a couple of taxis on Broadway, not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle.
All the way on the West Coast, never having seen a Broadway show, it was like, ‘They don’t want me. There’s nothing there for me.’ I’d come to New York a lot and never even tried to see a Broadway show. There was no reason for me to do that.
Some filmmakers set out to re-create the theater experience they got on Broadway. They kept everything the same. They shot the original casts. We reinvent the whole thing, look at it solely as a movie. We pretend that nobody saw ‘Chicago’ or ‘Hairspray.’
My first Broadway show was with Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton. Maureen Stapleton, a legend in the theatre; Elizabeth Taylor, a legend, period.
I really wanted to be a Broadway kid.
I love ‘Annie Hall,’ but then I adore ‘Hannah and Her Sisters.’ Dianne Wiest is amazing in ‘Bullets Over Broadway,’ but her in ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ I absolutely loved it.
It’s definitely one of those things when you decide to be an actor that it would be really cool to be in a Broadway show or a series regular on a hit show.
I learned from master teachers at the University of Evansville, at Juilliard, at Shakespeare festivals all over the country, eventually landing at Shakespeare in the Park in N.Y.C. That show transferred, so I got to make my Broadway debut doing ‘The Tempest’ with Patrick Stewart.
I’m the journeyman actor that you saw in one scene here, two scenes there. I’ve been eking out a living doing theater – Broadway, Off Broadway – film supporting roles, that I’m just excited to be a part of the conversation.
Broadway is not just the song and the shows; it’s the individual performers and the community.
I’d love to do Broadway. It’s funny. I love it, but I’ve never actually seen an actual Broadway show, not even ‘Hairspray.’
Broadway has always been a dream of mine.
I saw my first Broadway show when I was 10 years old. I saw ‘Big: The Musical’ and I remember going out to dinner with my mom afterward and reading the souvenir program like crazy!
Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.
What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you’re opening and cares about you. There’s a real village atmosphere.
I was a big Broadway fan for a while.
That’s always – that’s been another dream of mine, to do a Broadway play. An award winning Broadway play.
Broadway is obviously a dream come true, but audiences everywhere continue to make performing a blast.
Every time somebody would ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I would always say, ‘I want to be on Broadway!’
One day I got to meet him because he was teaching Broadway dance. It was a little after Tap came out and he was very young. He wouldn’t remember me, but it was quite amazing. And now I’ve met him as an adult!
I started auditioning, and the first job I ever got was understudying Amy Ryan in ‘The Sisters Rosensweig’ on Broadway, directed by Daniel Sullivan. I was 18 years old.
I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing “Give My Regards to Broadway”.
The idea of ‘Yes on Broadway’ has come up. It would reflect the history of Yes.
When I’m in the audience of Broadway shows, I feel like I’m in the presence of something really special with artists working at the height of their craft and doing the best work that they possibly can.
Bonnie and Clyde was the first show and the first role that I got to originate. Being part of that from the ground up and investing three years of my life into seeing that show come to Broadway was really rigorous but also so exciting.
I love musicals and I love Broadway.
Somewhere along the line, a concert became a variety show. It was no longer enough for four dudes to play together in front of some guitar amps. Costume changes, an army of dancers, and Broadway theatrics suddenly became standard for a ‘concert.’
Don’t know about a cabaret act right now, would actually prefer a role in a broadway musical.
I want to get the point across that you may not have money to give to a charity, whether that is Ronald McDonald House or Broadway Cares or DIFFA, but you can help RAISE money or give your time and talents.
Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.
To watch Lin Manuel Miranda… you could not make a better spokesperson for Broadway in a laboratory.
I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.
I realized with Broadway everything written for black people is usually written in the past, and I’m kind of a contemporary guy. I don’t think you want to see me in ‘Raisin in the Sun’.
My studio was on 9th Street between University and Broadway.
My passion was to be on Broadway and to be part of this community because I saw what it was like from the outside as the young kid in and around New York, and I would see things like the ‘Easter Bonnet’ or ‘Broadway Bares,’ things I would sneak into.
And I don’t consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial – that’s what it is. It’s expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I’m concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater.
But it’s a Broadway show, so even if you’re Christine in Phantom, you’re still a princess. All female leads are princesses whether they’re Disney princesses or not.
I love the Broadway audiences, who relish live drama and don’t hesitate to display their enthusiasm.
My first dream was Broadway.
The next time The Oregonian runs a misleading headline saying that it’s because of bike lanes that people aren’t having their streets paved, I want all of you to march down Broadway and occupy The Oregonian!
I love going to Broadway shows.
My grandmother took me to a lot of theater. I was exposed to performance quite a bit – everything from Broadway to off-Broadway and dance and music as well. I was very lucky that way. It was a very rich childhood.
I was shooting the third season of ‘The Big C’ and doing ‘The Normal Heart’ at the same time on Broadway, and I thought, ‘I’ll never do anything as difficult as this.’
Any chance I had to get in front of people – amateur talent contests at movie houses like the Broadway, the president – I took.
Imagination bound us stronger than love. Within its limitless borders we launched ships and love affairs, discovered lost worlds, made buildings and babies, found husbands, wrote letters and Broadway plays. We made ourselves up everyday.
You can’t remember what movie you saw two weeks ago, but you can remember what Broadway show you saw two weeks ago and where you ate dinner – everything about it. There’s something about live theatre that hits you in the heart.
What fuels me is that there are a lot of people coming to Broadway and to the show [Aladdin] for the first time. Lots of kids and lots of adults and it’s usually the kids were it’s a special moment for them.
I’ve been blessed to have acting opportunities in movies, television, as well as Broadway, and definitely want to continue to do so.
If my 12-year-old self knew that there was going to be a Broadway adaptation of ‘Newsies,’ I would have freaked out.
I think Broadway is waking up to the idea that rap is an incredible tool for telling a musical story.
There was something in Nick, becoming the Broadway star that he was and working from the age of 7, being on Broadway for four years, and then doing the music.
The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There’s not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what’s being offered.
Broadway has been my dream since I was 5 years old.
I didn’t grow up with Broadway music. My mother played Perry Como, while I listened to Andy Williams records. Later on it was Cream, Grand Funk Railroad and lots of R&B like the Isley Bros. and Parliament.
Broadway is so defeating for the most part that it doesn’t encourage people to be as tenacious as they should be.
Quitting the show was a complete anomaly in my life and my career. I’ve never missed out on anything. I relished the opportunity to be on Broadway… It’s the holy grail for people like me.
I used to love Woody Allen but feel he’s become a hack as a director. ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ is the only film of his I’ve enjoyed in the last 10 years.
If I were to talk to my younger self, I would say, ‘Girl, you’re gonna be on Broadway one day.’ I sometimes think about my younger self knowing that and how ridiculously she’s sobbing somewhere, so I would love to tell her that it’s all going to happen.
I would love to be on Broadway!
Broadway is a tough, tough arena for singing.
If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.
When I’m abroad, I burn all my money on Broadway.
All I ever wanted to do was bit parts on Broadway. I have more than achieved any goal that I aspired to.
I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, ‘I gotta go to Broadway.’
Broadway is like a club I haven’t been invited to, and I’m hoping that maybe they will give me a guest pass one of these days.
The first Broadway show I saw was when I was 11. I saw ‘Hair.’
The play I did on Broadway a couple of seasons ago started out of town and it moved its way into New York because of the experience that we had out of town.
I always wanted to be a Broadway girl. But once I got Tony-nominated, it really messed with me, because it was like, yes, I’m getting this affirmation that you’re right where you’re supposed to be, but there was still this voice saying, ‘You’re not good enough.’
I absolutely miss dancing. Don’t want to do it for a living, I’m getting old, I can’t move like I used to. If I had the opportunity to do something on Broadway or a musical, I would jump at the opportunity.
A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.
The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train – either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?
There is nothing wrong with loving musical theatre, but I think that it’s naive to hold it superior any other musical classification, especially since these other genres have been influencing Broadway more and more in recent decades.
I love acting. I love singing. Eventually, I’d love to go on Broadway. I love New York so much.
On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you’re lucky if the sound of a police car doesn’t rip the envelope twice a night.
My first Broadway show wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school. It was my first trip to New York. I came with a group of theatre kids, and we saw four shows. The very first one was ‘Contact.’
The fact that I even get in Broadway shows is, to me, still amazing, but then to win a Tony was just incredible.
It might be odd for people to hear this, but honestly, you know, when you’re on stage, I don’t think people realize how grueling eight shows a week is. And as far as jobs go, being a Broadway actor, it’s hard. It’s fun, but it’s hard.
You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.
I had toured around England endlessly throughout my teens, but when I came to the U.S. to perform on Broadway, that was a huge step.
Great as my dad was – I would never have gotten my first job announcing if I didn’t have the last name Buck – it’s my mom, Carole, who has made the biggest difference. She was on Broadway back in the 1960s. She understands entertainment, has incredible instincts.
The hope is they would like to bring it to Broadway next year, so we’ll see that’s to come in the end of the finance year and everybody else and also real estate and what theaters are available at the time but I would like to come back with it.
I would like to play Broadway!
The Broadway schedule is so tough, so relentless there was almost no time to enjoy all the stuff.
Broadway is such a diverse community. Everybody knows how I believe, and everyone believes, and it’s not a big deal. But in Hollywood, if you talk about politics – especially if you’re a Republican – or spirituality, it’s just not something people want to hear about.
The only reason to do a ‘SpongeBob’ on Broadway is if it’s gonna bring something new to the brand, something new to ‘SpongeBob,’ and also something innovative to theater and to Broadway.
The good thing about Broadway is that you don’t have to worry about an airdate. It gets done when it gets done.
A lot of people didn’t know I was doing Broadway. They thought I was one of those guys who was famous for being famous. I was the one who sat next to Charles Nelson Reilly and said funny things.
Michael has never cried during a Broadway show. Except in that scene where Tarzan’s ape father is brutally murdered. And that was only because he was laughing so hard.
I did I Love My Wife on Broadway in 1978, and then went into television land. Now things are starting to come together in the way I thought they might when I was a kid.
Guy asked me, ‘Scat, what is there left for you to do?’ And I said, ‘A Broadway play, man!’ Can you dig it? That’s the only thing I never done. I’d like to say I had.
When you’re starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands.
I feel like ‘Sweat’ arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for ‘Ruined’ or ‘Intimate Apparel’ for many different reasons.
When you’re a kid, you think ‘Oh, it’s so great. I’m going to go to Hollywood. I’m going to go to Broadway.’ For a long time, it was such a novelty.
Regarding the current Broadway revival of The Music Man, Jay Nordlinger wrote: There will always be those who sniff that the show is “feel good”-but, oh, it feels good to feel good. And the main reason The Music Man feels so good is that it is good-a great American musical.
I’d be very surprised if ‘The Greatest Showman’ didn’t end up on Broadway at some point.
I’d always wanted to be on Broadway one day, but it seemed like a dream that might be unattainable. This business has a lot of ups and downs and I learned that pretty quickly.
I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When ‘American Buffalo’ came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, ‘How dare he use that kind of language!’ Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for.
I never got to Broadway. I would love to do that.
Broadway was without doubt the hardest I ever worked in my life and the highest highs I’ve ever had as an actor. The unadulterated fear was on a level that was hard to explain.
I always wanted to work on Broadway. That’s something I always wanted to do.
‘Story of My Life’ was essentially a two-man musical play. In hindsight, I don’t know if there was room for a two-man musical on Broadway.
I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.
We do have American Idiot picked up by HBO and I wrote the record and concept to it. [We have] the writer Rolin Jones and [director] Michael Mayer [who also directed the Broadway production], so we’ll see what happens.
The Songwriters Hall of fame, that’s the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.
These opportunities to go on Broadway are the most special thing, and although the idea of doing something for a year or more is daunting, I love it. It’s my church and raises my spirit. It’s good for my soul.
I didn’t aspire to be on Broadway.
We may have limped onto Broadway as the underdogs, but underdogs bite back occasionally.
I was in ‘Grease’ on Broadway, toured with ‘Wicked,’ was off Broadway a couple of times and have been a part of numerous readings and workshops.
I was asked if I’d audition for a part in a Broadway musical because the director just loved me.
When ‘night, Mother’ opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.
I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg – that’s me – into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn’t fit.
The possibilities are endless for me – Broadway, TV, music and film.
I dropped the ‘Bundy’ with my country music because I wanted it to be two separate things: There’s me as a songwriter and a country singer, and there’s me as a Broadway performer.
Hip-hop was indifferent to Broadway. We didn’t need Broadway, but I think Broadway needed hip-hop.
Being a gay married man, I love Broadway musicals.
I’ve been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
I think I can work anywhere, but you don’t get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York.
I’m convinced whenever something opens on Broadway, it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle that people survived.
And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.
Broadway really inspired me to want to act.
Few people remember that I played a nun in the Broadway musical, ‘the Sound of Music.’
I was as content Off-Broadway as I was in a big Hollywood movie, and, I just try to be content wherever I am, you know.
And, I’d never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.
I’ve seen Hugh Jackman in a thousand Broadway shows.
I have a place in the Broadway community that can only be earned.
Without a doubt, I’d love to do Broadway. I actually can’t wait to get back to musical theater.
My early days in Broadway were all comedies. I never did a straight play on Broadway.
One of the boring tricks about capturing Broadway onscreen, actually, is just about all the different unions.
I’m doing a new musical on Broadway, which opens in October called ‘The Boy from Oz,’ where I play Peter Allen. For those of you who don’t know, he became first famous in America for marrying Liza Minelli.
Singing on Broadway terrified me more than anything I’ve done.
I relished the opportunity to be on Broadway… It’s the holy grail for people like me.
I don’t really know exactly what the plan is… I’m not a person that’s just pursuing acting or just pursuing singing or just pursuing dancing. You know, I would love to do reality television, I would like to go back to Broadway.
That’s my dream: one day, I want to standing on the stage on Broadway. I sing; my dancing is terrible, but I can be trained. That’s my dream. That’s something I really want to work on.
I had been coming to New York, pretty much once a month, to dance on Broadway. I was offered a huge Broadway show but couldn’t do it because my brother was having his huge Bar Mitzvah.
There’s not a lot of ego in the Broadway community. Everyone’s out to do well.
It’s a dream for all writers to write for Broadway.
Many years ago, when I was working on Broadway, I used to go to a drug rehabilitation centre on Sundays. I didn’t lecture them against the perils of drug-taking; I gave them drama therapy.
I get psyched about coming onto a Broadway stage every night. it’s very exciting. You develop a kind of gratefulness for it when you spend months trying to get a job.
Doing my Broadway show ‘700 Sundays’ reminded me how much I love working in front of an audience.
I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn’t. It’s a pain. But I didn’t feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.
Being a kid and growing up in Cleveland, the Tonys were how you saw Broadway shows: you got to hear from each show, and that’s what inspired me to live my dream, so the fact that I am getting recognition from them, it’s mind-blowing.
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I’m both.
Broadway musicals, where you sing the whole time, I really don’t like; I like alternating dialogue and music.
I did ‘Spring Awakening’ on Broadway for about three years, and I did over 500 performances.
I would love a career on Broadway. It’s always been my dream ever since I was a little girl and some of my biggest idols are on Broadway right now, like Melanie Moore and Ricky Ubeda.
My father’s Alfred Newman – born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he’s one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter – went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.
Film is much more of a brand business, whereas on Broadway, you can do complete unknowns and have hits.
I grew up in a crazy, gypsy-like household of actors, dancers and loony Broadway people. It was their way of life, and I didn’t know anything else.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
I was pre-med in college, and so since a lot of people take a year off before they go to med school, I decided to take the time to pursue theater – six months later, I was on Broadway.
I’d love to go back to Broadway if there was a place for me there. I would absolutely go back; it’s just a part of me.
One of the things I find very little of in America – and certainly not on Broadway – are plays with political attitudes.
Being on Broadway and getting a Tony nomination – this has been an incredible ride, from rather humble beginnings.
It’s better to star in Oshkosh than to starve on Broadway.
‘One Night Only,’ the words I’ll be hearing from my agents when I tell them I’m coming back to Broadway.
It was always my dream, to do a leading role on Broadway. It’s what I went to college to do, in hopes of one day someone taking a chance on me and saying, ‘You know what? You’re going to be our girl.’
No one told me that if you can’t sing, you probably won’t be on Broadway. No one told me that!
I’m very optimistic about the future, because… Okay, with Audra McDonald, even just on Broadway, they cast her in shows that are usually not played by African-American women, so she’s very inspiring to me just because of that, you know what I mean?
When I was 20 years old, my mom flew me for my first Broadway audition for ‘The Color Purple,’ and I only found out about it because I knew that Fantasia was in it, and so I went online to ActorsEquity.com. I was not a part of the union, but I flew there for the audition, and the next week I made my Broadway debut!
Yeah, I put out some goofy stuff. I had no idea who I was as an artist at all before ‘Posse on Broadway.’
I’ve been to London twice. I saw the Broadway show ‘Billy Elliot’ there – phenomenal. I was crying through the entire thing.
It’s interesting – years ago, I had such bad stage fright during musical theater auditions that I just gave up. And now I’m on Broadway.
I thought about doing ’36 Chambers’ on Broadway.
I think that I always thought that if my uncle was on Broadway, then I must inherently have a good voice. I don’t think that for a while I did. Eventually, out of sheer will of never wanting to get a job or go to college, I found my way into doing music full-time.
It’s tourists in New York. Everything is geared towards that. It’s so hard on Broadway now for them to get people in there. They have to compete with so many other entertainments, so they have to bring a star in which puts people there out of work.
I wasn’t straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.
It was during my first trip to America in 1953 – thats when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.
When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
My introduction to acting was through theatre, so I actually saw a couple of Broadway shows that made me want to be an actor.
My first role was on Broadway from 1963-64 in Chips With Everything.’ It was very well reviewed but not very well attended.
Moving to L.A. and making albums was an exciting outlet, but I always thought I’d be slumming it job to job in N.Y.C. with hopes of being on Broadway!
All I ever wanted to do was be on Broadway. I mean, remember, I grew up in a trailer.
I’ve done some TV and I’ve done a lot of theater, obviously, and the last character I played on Broadway was a very fast-talking broad. I’m used to learning material and words.
I thought I would move to New York and be on Broadway; that was my goal. I was very work-focused.
The first role that I got on Broadway was supposedly for a white man. But I had some producers who fought for me and allowed me to come in.
I’d like to do Broadway if the right project came along, but my mission in life is that I want to help change people’s lives.
If I hadn’t decided to be a fashion designer, I would have loved to be a Broadway showgirl or a Rockette!
I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to work on Broadway, but it doesn’t give me an outside life. So I decided to go into the concert world. I do 40 to 50 shows. That takes one to three days a week, and I’m home the rest of the time.
I am a Broadway theatre guy… so it was kind of my goal this year to come out to LA for pilot season and expand my horizons
Oh, I miss the excitement and immediacy of Broadway and the theaters.
Most of Broadway is based on a movie or a book. You don’t see many original musicals.
The whole cast and creative team were definitely aware of the ‘This is the death of Broadway!’ kind of thing about ‘SpongeBob,’ but we’ve been really ready to change people’s minds. I’m really proud of being part of something that took the most creative route to a commercial entity.
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.
As the years went by, working on Broadway, I started seeing that I had a fan base and that they were mostly young girls. They are looking for someone that they can look up to, that they see as a role model. And I don’t take that lightly; it’s a big responsibility.
A professional music career goes in starts and stops. Around 2000 I was doing a Broadway show and that was some real good energy.
I did Broadway shows. And I started realizing that this is actually how I’m going to make my living. So maybe I should try to do television and film and make a better living and get an occasional residual check so I can pay a mortgage someday.
My skirt fell off on stage during a performance of Hairspray on Broadway, revealing my fat suit over my own natural fat suit. I turned to the audience and said, ‘Now you know why I spent six years in a square.’
I think on a bucket list for a performer is definitely doing a stage show, whether it’s in Vegas or on Broadway or whatever.
I always admired Hugh Jackman as an actor in movies but also in theatre because I’m a big fan of Broadway musicals.
My favorite Broadway show day-to-day, just for the experience, was ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.’ The people were so much fun. It was a great show.
When I wasn’t working on Broadway, I worked in a Bat Mitzvah dress shop and was the Cinderella of the shop – always cleaning and vacuuming!
I auditioned for the part of Cosette in ‘Les Miserables’ on Broadway. It didn’t work out.
I did do an off-Broadway show for about 15 months. ’91 and ’92. It was nice to have a steady paycheck for a while. It was Oliver Jackson and Earl May, Art Barron and myself were the house band. I was 24 and 25 at the time.
When ”night, Mother’ opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.
When I auditioned for ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ on Broadway, Gower Champion said, ‘You’ve got the job!’ I said, ‘Mr. Champion, I can’t dance.’ He said, ‘We’ll teach you what you need to know.’
I like pop, rock n’ roll, big band, Broadway – I like all those elements.
I experienced a lot while I was away from the industry. From being on Broadway to learning more about myself. Those are really the things that I’m writing about.
I miss Broadway! I’m still a theatre kid, don’t worry!
I took a trip to D.C. before the Off Broadway production started, and one of the things that was really telling is that Hamilton has probably the smallest statue in all of the Mall area, and yet he’s got the greatest monument of any of them because we’re all walking around with him in our pockets.
I had originally planned to do musical theatre and be on Broadway, but then my love for poetry also set in. Once that happened, I became torn between a career as an English teacher or a music teacher.
Broadway is a main artery of New York life – the hardened artery.
I love being on Broadway and it’s awesome and a dream come true but also it’s about the work and making sure you’re doing what you’re doing right.
The Greatest Showman’ would be an amazing Broadway hit.
I am very much looking forward to new adventures – including, I hope, Broadway – sooner rather than later.
I don’t really want to be known as just the puppet girl or just a singing ventriloquist. I want to be known as the performer, singer, ventriloquist, actress, Broadway star, all of it. I want do it all.
Launching a Broadway show is like no other endeavor. It’s taxing because you’re present – it’s not like cutting a movie and test focus-grouping it and filling out forms.
I’d studied dance in Chicago every summer end taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded. I wasn’t worried about getting a job on Broadway. In fact, I got one the first week.
I did find it particularly difficult to do Broadway. It was not my favourite way to perform. When I do theatre, I like it to be smaller. I like the audience to be closer; I like it to be less presentational.
Broadway is full of crazy people.
My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It’s kind of flipped, and I’m not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.
Making my Broadway debut was, in and of itself, just a dream come true. I’ve wanted to be on Broadway forever.
Let’s give a big cuddly shout-out to Pat Healy, infant provocateur and amateur journalist at The New York Times. Keep it up, Pat – one day perhaps you’ll learn something about how Broadway works, and maybe even understand it.
When St Genesius, the patron saint of actors, refused to act in a Roman play that ridiculed Christianity, the legend goes, the producers executed him. It reminds some people of Broadway today.
I remember when I was doing ‘The Crucible’ on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, ‘Let’s make sure we remember this.’
I love going to see the theatre whether it’s a Broadway play or a Russian ballet company.
‘Broadway’ is one of the big American words. It’s exciting to be given the chance to rattle around in one of the big words.
I did six Broadway shows, and I noticed there weren’t many female comedians. When I went to a dancing audition, there were 1,000 girls. And there were three jobs. So I said I’ll just try comedy. And I loved it.
The producers and I first talked about the Big Fish musical, right before we did the first test screening of the movie. I said, “I think there’s a Broadway musical here.” And really, from that day, we started figuring out how we would do it.
If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no ‘times’ anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.
Growing up, the dream was to be on Broadway. I always loved theater.
I love Broadway. I love live performing. It’s really spiritual when you can get to interact with people, and they actually affect how your show goes.
I remember telling the agent, ‘I don’t want to do anything but Broadway.’ She was like, ‘That’s not really possible because there is not that much Broadway. So I’ll send you out on TV and stuff like that.’
I am a collector of many things, but I particularly love the sterling silver mint julep cups, each engraved with the titles of the Broadway shows in which I appeared.
My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.
There have been two [career highlights]. Waking up in New York to hear I’d been nominated for Best Actor for a Tony Award on Broadway, for An Ideal Husband. The other one was waking up the morning after the opening night of A Man For All Seasons and reading the reviews.
The magnitude of being able to make my Broadway debut as SpongeBob in ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ really only started to hit me when we took it out of town.
By 1949, there was no more work for me out there, and I went to New York in 1950 and just did whatever I could. Mainly television. Some Broadway. A lot of dinner theater work, which is not a very satisfactory medium.
What success I achieved in the theatre is due to the fact that I have always worked just as hard when there were ten people in the house as when there were thousands. Just as hard in Springfield, Illinois as on Broadway.
Some of my own books are being developed – one as a Broadway musical.
I wouldn’t mind doing Broadway, but I am definitely trying to get a album out there first.
I own four copies of Robin WIlliams’s Live on Broadway comedy special for HBO. One in Wilmington, one in L.A., one in my trailer, and one at my parents’ house. I can watch it over and over again and it never gets old. He is the funniest, wittiest man on the planet!
It was a dream to be on Broadway as a kid, so to actually end up there, I loved it.
I struggled for a while, but when I was cast in an Off Broadway show called ‘Once Upon a Mattress,’ that kind of put me on the map.
I don’t think that everything on Broadway relates to us, and I think that’s why we as black people don’t always go to Broadway shows, but shows like ‘What’s on the Hearts of Men’ has a lot of issues that can relate to black families, and that’s why I enjoy it.
I toured around the country and met all these Broadway producers who put me in all these Neil Simon plays like ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ and ‘Biloxi Blues.’
There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.
I’m a big Broadway fan and a big MGM fan.
In ’92, I got my first Broadway show as a performer – ‘Crazy for You.’ I was in the ensemble. In fact, I was in eight Broadway shows as a dancer. Seven of them were original shows. That’s how I learned to create something from the ground up.
I know, it’s weird that I’ve never done a musical. I turned down two of them. ‘The Lion King’ and ‘The Producers.’ I turned two of the biggest Broadway musicals down, am I a mess?
Acting, I started when I was six and a half years-old, on Broadway with Kurt Weill.
I had to get used to the theater atmosphere because I haven’t had a role on Broadway since Aida. It was a different process from day one because I was learning my parts by myself.
Performing on Broadway is an honor and a challenge for any artist.
I really feel confident about my dancing now, so I hope there could be a place for me in the West End or on Broadway – maybe a musical, maybe my own show.
The pigeons are shitting on George M. Cohan. I shoo them off. They fly up and perch on his hat. Cohan would’ve never given his regards to Broadway if he saw how dirty they kept his statue in Duffy Square. New Yorkers walk right by. Nobody cares.
I was in New York doing musicals in the theater and on Broadway before ‘Orange,’ so people always ask, ‘Are you ever going to get to sing? Does she even sing?’ But people who know me know I actually do sing.
I would love to do a talk show. Naturally, I would love to do more films. I’d love to be able to see casting directors more willing to put in a character who happens to be deaf. I’m not talking about doing deaf storylines, but putting in deaf characters. I’d love to be able to do Broadway.
I would love to play, perhaps not exactly Mimi in ‘Rent,’ but someone like her. Perhaps not on Broadway, but I think I feel like a musical is in my future. I sing, although I’m not Whitney Houston up in here. I’m a little bit shy about my singing, but I did it in school at Juilliard.
Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.
For your first musical in New York, to go to Broadway and be nominated for a Tony is a dream come true.
Sometimes it should be the job of Broadway to introduce stars as well as cast them.
I have this huge, huge fan base of people who’ve never seen a Broadway show, but I think it’s a great introduction to what Broadway is because my shows are not that. I think that if you’re getting people to go to theater then somebody should be celebrating that.
Broadway doesn’t pay that much.
I don’t think of myself as a TV actor. I think of myself as a film, television and Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway actor.
I spent a lot of time in the trenches in New York doing a lot of off-off-off Broadway theater.
I would love to do a non-musical Broadway or Off-Broadway play.
If Broadway shows charge preview prices while the cast is in dress rehearsal, why should restaurants charge full price when their dining room and kitchen staffs are still practicing?
Broadway – the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
Acting on the stage is a luxury for me. I lose money. I make movies for financial reasons and this allows me the luxury of acting on Broadway. Hollywood, unfortunately, exploits actors for their own reasons, which are usually financial. So we might as well exploit Hollywood as much as it exploits us.
Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
The emergence of social media in the Broadway fan’s life – it’s sort of a serendipitous thing for us and for a lot of shows. I always wonder what ‘Rent’ would’ve felt like through that lens.
I love the theater community and theater life, and would love to figure out the distinctive differences between Broadway and the West End.
People sometimes forget how important Broadway is as a place for young actors to grow.
Better a square foot of New York than all the rest of the world in a lump – better a lamppost on Broadway than the brightest star in the sky.
I did a reality TV show in London called ‘I’d Do Anything,’ and when I got put in the program, they said, ‘What is your ultimate dream?’ and I said, ‘Broadway.’
So somehow we’ve got to get back to making stuff for people that are not necessarily interested in seeing the common Broadway fare.
I’ve always loved Broadway, but I never thought I’d actually do it because I was never a full Broadway dancer. And I don’t have a big, booming voice.
I came to Broadway through Indiana University.
I’m a Broadway baby! So, therefore, I started in the theater.
I would love to do Broadway the rest of my life! Because it’s challenging, because it makes me grow as an actor, as an entertainer, as an artist, and that’s what I need; that’s what I’m hooked on.
When ‘Newsies’ first came out, it just crash-landed with a thud; it won a Razzie for worst song of the year, and I felt such embarrassment. Fast-forward, and it’s a hit on Broadway, and I win a Tony for the score!
Broadway has changed tremendously from the early days when the shows were referred to as musical comedies. Musical Theater is now a more expanded art form. Back then, singer/actors were not the norm. From the 60’s to now, it is necessary to do it all to be a consummate Broadway performer.
I’ve done a lot of Broadway plays, and I’m fortunate they’ve all been so successful.
My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.
‘Grease’ was my Broadway debut. That was eye-opening. At the same time, it was very familiar. It was a Broadway show, but it’s kind of the same as doing a show in Minnesota. It’s the same type of rehearsal process. You are doing 8 shows a week, but I worked at a theatre in Minnesota that did 11 shows a week.
Sidney Poitier was directing a film called ‘Hanky Panky.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to come with me to New York to see Gilda Radner in ‘Lunch Hour’ on Broadway? I said, ‘I don’t need to see her, I love her. I’ve wanted to write something for her for a long time. So it’s OK by me.’
The Beatles have a deeper appreciation of all music. There’s a humor, there’s a Broadway sense, and later on, the Indian stuff came in. The Beatles were always taking in stuff and filtering stuff out to us. There’s such a classical sense of arrangement, and their harmonies-what the Beatles did vocally is amazing.
I always thought Broadway’s the goal, and then I moved out to L.A. with ‘Wicked’ and started doing guest-star spots and little recurring things, and I was like, ‘Well, this is pretty great; I’m kind of digging this.’
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.
L.A., its nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps.
I wanted a Broadway credit, but ‘Crazy Ex’ came along, and it blessed me.
Broadway is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
All I ever wanted to do when I was a kid was be in a Broadway musical and to be in ‘Star Trek,’ and I can finally say I’ve done that.
I didn’t think it was my dream to be on Broadway; it just sort of became that, and then it just became me wanting it more and more and more.
When ‘Catch Me If You Can’ was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What’s amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print.
I’m blacked than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
I would also like to act, once in a while, but not get up every morning at 5:30 or six o’clock and pound into the studio and get home at 7:30 or eight o’clock at night, or act over and over and over every night on Broadway, either.
The Grand Ole Opry, to a country singer, is what Yankee Stadium is to a baseball player. Broadway to an actor. It’s the top of the ladder, the top of the mountain. You don’t just play the Opry; you live it.
I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I’m now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.
I want to toy around with producing a Broadway show.
on Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies.
Teaching … particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they’re all in the room. They know, like, nothing.
There are countless fantastic actors out there who are being denied the opportunity to play Broadway because they’re not a name, and I think that’s kind of wrong.
There’s only one Broadway and that’s in New York City.
I know, for me, you know, my generation – I never would have known anything about Robert Preston’s performance in ‘The Music Man’ if there hadn’t been a film where he played the part. I just heard how great he was on Broadway way before my time.
I got into a Broadway show before I ever sang and danced. I learned how after I got in the show.
When I came out with ‘Posse on Broadway,’ I decided, enough with trying to imitate New York, enough with trying to imitate L.A., let’s just be Seattle. And rock, grunge, followed right after ‘Posse on Broadway’ and Seattle just exploded.
At the premiere of Hairspray on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein’s mom said to my mom, “Didn’t we raise great sons?” and my mother just started sobbing, because I’m sure they’d both been through other nights when people didn’t say that.
As I’ve gotten older and I’ve watched people in productions, I go to the theater when I go back to London and see friends in Broadway, I think maybe there might come a time here to get back up there and prove oneself. It’s just an itch; it’s a nagging itch to go back there.
I had already played a lead on Broadway before I ever did a film. I had had three, four seasons of stock with good, fat parts, good supporting and leading parts. And I had done, oh, God, over 400 live TV shows.
I just hope to keep doing film and TV and eventually Broadway. It’s definitely what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I’m writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I’ve brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.
I would like a shot at Broadway.
My return to the theater in New York was so specific. I didn’t want it to be about leveraging my exposure or my fame, so the first show I did in New York was an ensemble piece at an Off-Broadway theater, and I wanted to make sure that it was just about the play and about the experience.
It just happened that we did [Fences] seven years ago on Broadway. Scott Rudin brought me August Wilson’s original screenplay for it, and I realized I hadn’t read the play. So I read it. Then I realized that Troy (my character) was 53 – and I was 55 at the time. I realized I better hurry up! I might be too old!
If you had asked me when I was little, like, ‘Imagine you were on Broadway,’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, right.’
We didn’t go to Broadway musicals when I was growing up; it was too expensive.
I was just on Broadway for four months, and the amount of fan mail that arrived at the theater was just overwhelming. I mean, I had no idea! I guess people suddenly had access to me and knew where to find me, so they got me there, and I was amazed.
For two consecutive Broadway seasons, I had probably the best juvenile roles there were for an actor. Then I moved to California to recreate my role in the film version of ‘Tribute.’ I started working in film and television after that, and 38 years blew by!
I would love to be on Broadway. I would love to do a three-month run, similar to how celebrities do a three-month run on ‘Chicago.’ Something like that would be awesome. So, I’m putting it out there.
I’ve worked with a lot of gay and lesbian organizations. I sit on the board of the Empire State Pride Agenda. I’ve also done a lot of work for Broadway Care/Equity Fights AIDS. I think it’s important because, when we can be of service to others, it only enhances our lives. I’ve been helped a lot in my life.
I think ‘Hand to God’ is going to change the landscape of Broadway. I think Broadway, truthfully, will never be the same.
Have you seen the Broadway version of ‘The Lion King?’ Go and see it. That’s where the future of musical is.
I like playing the same person over and over again. I’ve done shows for over a year on Broadway, and I never get bored.
I’ve been dancing since I was seven, but I never really developed a regimen until I was on Broadway and responsible for a professional performance every night.
No show would be successful if you took a group of people and just said, ‘You’re dumb!’ over and over. That’s not what Broadway’s about.
I go down the street thinking, ‘Oh my God, I live in New York.’ But then I think, ‘Oh my God, I’m on Broadway!’
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
The first Broadway play I ever saw was ‘The Bad Seed’ by Maxwell Anderson and with Patty McCormack. ‘The Bad Seed’ was from an extraordinary novel by William March.
Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera.
I’ve always loved going to see Broadway shows. I’ve seen ’em all: Rent, Chorus Line, Cats, West Side Story, Guys & Dolls, Wicked, you name it!
It came up after doing St. Jimmy on Broadway for American Idiot. I loved acting, and so I just kept my options open.
The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.
It’s always been a dream of mine to be Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse, and here I am performing alongside Robert Lindsay and being directed by a major Broadway producer. Who said dreams don’t come true?
Like when that man was running down Broadway stark naked and we all had to eat in the cafeteria while the police tried to catch him.
If I thought about it before I went on, I would have never went on. So, therefore, you don’t think about it; you have to talk yourself then into, ‘Listen, this is it. This is the gig. Broadway or no Broadway, you’ve got to do your job.’
The Depression was remarkable because you had nothing, and the salaries, when you got a job, were very small. But you could do anything. You see, a donut was ten cents. A cup of coffee was a nickel. That was lunch, with an apple. And I would be playing a lead on a Broadway show on that kind of diet.
Some of my best friends have written Broadway shows. Allee Willis and Brenda Russell wrote The Color Purple which has been recently revived on Broadway. That to me is such a different hat that you have to wear, but music is music. A Broadway show is something I would love to have the opportunity to do.
I am not a sex symbol of the Broadway community. I know guys who are, and I say, ‘Rock it out.’ But I’m more comfortable in a different land. I don’t know what land it is, but not that one.
I didn’t have an agent until I got ‘Hairspray.’ I had to get a Broadway show without an agent to get an agent.
I am not of the impression that an overwhelming amount Hip Hop artists are super savvy on Broadway and it’s goings-on, but who knows.
It was during my first trip to America in 1953 – that’s when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.
The streets of New York are diverse, but when you go into a Broadway show, unless Denzel Washington is in it, or Fantasia’s in it, it’s a lot of old white people and gay men.
I was really into dancing, taking six classes a week, and my real dream was to be in a Broadway show.
That experience with ‘Rent’ went by so fast. I was younger. I didn’t even really know what opening night was. And now I’m thinking back on the times I went to Broadway as a kid and the excitement I felt… And I’m realizing that I’m actually a part of that, so I’m learning to take it in, ’cause so often I shrug it away.
It’s interesting that the wondrous ‘Hamilton,’ which I could not be more ecstatic about, has taken a long time to perfect to bring it to Broadway. And it wouldn’t have been possible if it was developed in the commercial theatre from the get-go.
I’ve done a bunch of Broadway, so I’m a theater nerd when I come to New York.
Ever since I was little, Broadway had always been my passion.
I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier’s first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.
Hollywood has its Oscars. Television has its Emmys. Broadway has its Tonys. And advertising has its Clios. And its Andys, Addys, Effies and Obies. And 117 other assorted awards. And those are just the big ones.
I was in my last year in high school when I began to think of becoming a dancer. I had never seen a Broadway show; we never even read the theatrical reviews.
In high school, I was doing my magazine ‘Rookie’ and a lot of writing, and I became a little less interested in the fashion world. I was approached by an agent for writing, and I said I wanted to act as well. They sent me scripts, and then I got my first Broadway play, ‘This Is Our Youth’.
Broadway is a definite symbol of New York. It’s classic New York.
I grew up going to musicals with my mom here in New York, going to Broadway. I used to be in musicals in high school.
I live in Derry, a little town in Ireland, and I don’t have the background of Hollywood or Broadway.
Broadway is really, really hard.
I would absolutely love to do a revival of ‘Bury the Dead’ by Irwin Shaw on Broadway, but it would have to be Joe Calarco’s version that we did Off-Broadway at The Transport Group in 2008. It was just one of those amazing shows that didn’t run long enough and not nearly enough people got a chance to see.
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 miss Broadway, what little there is on Broadway now.
I would love to do a Broadway play. I would love to do big screen also, motion picture.
I’d studied dance in Chicago every summer and taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded. I wasn’t worried about getting a job on Broadway. In fact, I got one the first week.
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.
I’ll never forget the first moment I stepped on a Broadway stage. It was in Grease, and I knew it was momentous. My parents were there, and I got into a cab with them afterward and started crying.
I’ve always wanted to do Broadway.
The chance to work on Broadway choreography as opposed to having to deliver Broadway choreography can be two distinct things.
What’s interesting was with all the shows I did on Broadway, I was either the dance captain or the assistant choreographer – I sort of worked my way up to that kind of thing – and I always was interested in more than just the dancers and the numbers. I would always sneak into the room and watch the scene work.
I enjoyed the courtroom as just another stage but not so amusing as Broadway.
A lot of high school students on TV and in Broadway are played by people in their late 20s and even early 30s. That seems weird to me.
I’m in a play on Broadway, I have an animated TV show coming up, I have a few movies that just came out.
Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.
Nobody knows I sing. Even though I’ve done Broadway musicals. I would only pick it over acting because it’s such a pure form of emotional expression.
The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.
The great thing about doing a series about the Broadway community is that the possibilities are endless.
I never dreamed that I would be part of a Broadway show.
I love music. I’d love to go on Broadway and do a musical there. I just like to kind of go with whatever’s inspiring at the moment, and kind of follow that as far as I can.
Luckily for me, when I was growing up in high school, I had a band, and I was a singer in the band. I’m less of a legit Broadway singer than I am a pop-rock singer.
I have ambitions to do a Broadway record one of these days and get in the studio with like, a real orchestra. I’m a big musical theatre geek.
Broadway has the most savvy audience anywhere. They see everything and they know their theater. As sophisticated and subtle as you think you can be, the houses you get here will want something finer.
It still feels like Hip Hop is in the early ’80s on Broadway.
There are a lot of other work forces that don’t do things the way the Broadway community does.
My plays aren’t stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.
I’m very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in ‘Gross Indecency’ off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in ‘The Iceman Cometh.’
My first job was on Broadway. Then I went into the Navy. When I came out of the Navy, I went back to Broadway and a friend of mine, Lauren Bacall, was in Hollywood filming with Humphrey Bogart. She told one of her producers I was great in my play, and he saw it and cast me in ‘The Strange Love of Martha Ivers’.
I am wearing Santo Loquasto’s beautiful costumes. I get to stand on stage at 71 years old wearing the most darling dance boots. I am working with my dresser, who is the best dresser on Broadway; he’s traveling with me. It’s divine. It doesn’t get better than this.
I knew when I was a kid that I had a Broadway voice. I wanted to be a rocker, because I grew up in that era of transistor radios at the beach.
I’ve done three Broadway musicals and tons of concerts and all kinds of things, but nobody knows that except the people in New York.
That’s why I had to leave Hair on Broadway, because I did it for about a year, and one night I was doing the show, and I realized, well, this is not real. I told the director. He says, man, it was a killer show tonight.
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’ve been really fortunate to do several shows on Broadway; the longest run I’ve done is nine months, and that was ‘Porgy and Bess.’ The shortest run I’ve done was about a month and a half: my first Broadway lead in ‘The Scottsboro Boys.’
I feel like being on Broadway will convince my mother that my theater degree was worth it.
There was a week where I was depressed with the rain, and people were telling me to get a light box. But I live on the 14th floor of an apartment complex, and I see the Broadway Bridge and Mount Hood, and it keeps me such company. And like true Oregonians, I don’t carry an umbrella anymore.
Broadway is not about surprises. It’s about rewarding the putrid, formulaic crap that makes Broadway Broadway.
When I’m writing Broadway, it’s for a character, a man, a woman, an old guy, a kid. In the band, you’re talking in your own voice in the lyrics, saying what you think or feel. On Broadway, you’re expressing that through a character.
I just love the idea of doing an all-female play on Broadway.
Drag wasn’t really on Broadway. It was considered low-class.
What I want is credibility I got as a songwriter and actor and doing ‘Blood Brothers’ on Broadway with my brother Shaun.
My father was Abe Burrows, who was a Broadway legend. ‘Guys and Dolls,’ ‘How to Succeed,’ ‘Cactus Flower,’ ’40 Karats,’ ‘Can-Can,’ ‘Happy Hunting,’ ‘Reclining Figure,’ it goes on. He was a legend, and when I was growing up, I was Abe Burrows’ kid. That was my self-esteem.
I did a Broadway show with Alan Alda
and how much money can Alan Alda have.
and how much money can Alan Alda have.
I’m a Broadway baby, through and through. It’s my first love, and it’s what brought me to New York in the first place.
Being a New Yorker, I used to dance to Latin music. There was a place called the Palladium on Broadway. And Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez used to play. So I still have that in my blood.
It’s glamorous when a movie is released, but then you feel disconnected from it. Someone asked if it wouldn’t be more glamorous for me being on Broadway rather than Off Broadway, but I thought, ‘What’s the difference?’ The Orpheum is a smaller house, that’s all. And there are no mikes, so you just talk louder.
Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.
Basically my influences have been American influences. It’s been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.
The people I idolized I saw once a year on the Tony Awards. I would buy the cassette tapes of the various Broadway shows and scour the photos inside the recording package. That’s how I exposed myself to the arts – New York and professional theater felt like a very distant thing.
Going to Broadway – then to be invited to the Tonys – I really tap into what that feels like now to fulfill lifetime goals.
I got my first paycheck as a cast member in the Broadway production of ‘HAIR’ when I was 16 years old.
There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
The dream is to originate a role in a show on Broadway. That’s the ultimate goal.
I love ‘Bullets Over Broadway,’ but I’m pretty sure Woody Allen hasn’t killed somebody.
I’m an actor first and foremost. But I’ve also started an organization, Broadway Impact, that advocates for marriage equality. I’m an actorvist.
It’s the coolest job to be on Broadway.
I would really have liked to have gone to Broadway with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ I was proud of that.
I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason Bringing something we must learn And we are led to those who help us most to grow If we let them and we help them in return.
I’ve never been an actor on Broadway, but it feels like you’re on a stage when you play at Yankee Stadium. And that’s the feeling I’ve always had.
Broadway is at its best when it represents as many people as possible.
I have theatre-training, I love doing theatre, I’ve done Broadway.
Broadway is intimidating. Don’t think it’s not.
I was at Elon University in North Carolina for two years pursuing my BFA. And after my sophomore year, I was cast in the Broadway Tour of ‘West Side Story.’ I just kind of – it always was my favorite show growing up.
I booked my first national tour of a Broadway show right out of college. It was the tap show, ’42nd Street.’ I had only been tap dancing for three years when I booked that show.
I would love to do Evita or Elphaba in Wicked. But I am more excited to originate a role on Broadway.
I used to watch the Broadway ‘Les Miz’ and study it.
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you’re lucky if the sound of a police car doesn’t rip the envelope twice a night.
I grew up with ‘Cinderella.’ So that was my go-to Disney film, definitely. It was princess-related, and coming from a smaller area in Illinois and wanting to do something greater than myself in Broadway, that was a film that I could really relate to.
I want to be back on Broadway one day. That’s a dream of mine. There’s nothing like live theater, and I think it’s so important for me to be able to be on stage with an audience that responds.
Broadway musicals like ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ ‘Eubie’ and ‘Bubblin’ Brown Sugar’ depict blacks having a light, wonderful time and that was just not so for blacks in the ’20s and ’30s.
It wasn’t until I saw ‘The Color Purple’ on Broadway when I was 15 that I really solidified acting is what I want to do professionally.
Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is.
Tolerance actually does exist on Broadway.
I really cut my teeth on off-off-off Broadway shows.
When I was on Broadway when I was little, I remember always driving through Times Square with my dad to the theater. Now when I go back, you can’t even drive on Broadway in the 40s. New Times Square is too touristy to me.
For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: ‘Chicago,’ ‘Wicked’ and ‘Anything Goes.’
I loved being a film executive. But something was always missing for me. I always had the feeling that I was looking over my shoulder – what’s going on on Broadway?
I was dancing on Broadway for many years. Then everyone was either getting injured or retiring, and I was dancing with younger dancers.
I’m not gay, so I don’t know much about Broadway musicals.
I got nominated for a Tony in my Broadway debut, which was fascinating and thrilling and sort of unbelievable all at the same time.
I would love to be on a sitcom or on Broadway.
I definitely want my career to continue to branch out. I’ve had the pleasure of working in different areas of entertainment, from being in the music business as a teenager in a girl group to doing Broadway for three years in ‘Hairspray,’ and also doing TV and film.
I made my Broadway debut in the revival of Hair and followed it up with the bus and truck tour of Grease.
I’ve had the good fortune of working with some amazing people. I mean, my first Broadway show was with Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton. Maureen Stapleton, a legend in the theatre; Elizabeth Taylor, a legend, period.
I should be on Broadway. You have to sing, you have to dance, you have to speak well, and I’m good at all of those!
MEDICINE, n. A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.
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 keep fooling people into giving me jobs, and now I’m on Broadway. It’s always something I’ve wanted to be a part of, and I can’t believe that this is the experience I’m having.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn’t really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
On Broadway, there is no censoring, just self-censorship and doing what makes sense.
I’ve done a couple of Broadway shows and sang before I did any acting.
But to me, Broadway has always had more a ‘village’ feeling than London’s West End. The theaters here are clustered together, the staff and many people in the business know each other – it’s like a little village all to itself, whereas in London everything is more spread out.
The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there’s only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I’ve never liked.
After I graduated, I tried Broadway, which was difficult for me. It was tough to get a part on Broadway, so I just started talking to audiences at different social gatherings, and little by little I became Don Rickles – whatever that is.
Broadway’s a lot of work, don’t get me wrong. It’s eight shows a week. You hardly ever see the sunset. I remember when I left, I was like, ‘Oh! The sun’s setting! I haven’t seen that in a year!’ Singing eight shows a week is hard.
I think everybody who was in it thought they were all going to be Eartha Kitt or be big stars. That didn’t happen, but it was a wake-up call to have one’s first professional job on Broadway, I must say.
I played St. Jimmy on Broadway I sort of caught the acting bug. But I didn’t want to go full-bore into it because I have a lot to learn.
I did a lot of musical theater when I was younger, and I really hope to get back there someday. I miss singing a lot. I listen to Broadway show tunes in my car and sing along to them.
‘Hairspray’ was my first Broadway show. In the meantime, after the show was over, I would go down and do gigs at these clubs that I wasn’t even old enough to get into. That continued on, and I think what ended up happening was that I just got these incredible opportunities on Broadway.
The MTC is known for singing music by great master composers, hymns, American music, Broadway numbers, popular songs, and inspirational music. If the audience doesn’t like one genre, they need only wait for the next number.
And I don’t consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial – that’s what it is. It’s expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and off-off Broadway as far as I’m concerned is in New York the pride of New York theater.
It would be fun to be eighty-five and have a Broadway debut. That’s the goal I’m shooting for. When they revive ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ for the seven-hundredth time.
My daughter just graduated college and she’s a dance major. She’s done a couple of dance videos already and won Miss Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. She’s going out for Miss United States the second week of July, out in Las Vegas. She will probably wind up going to New York and trying the Broadway thing.
I was a weird kid. I should’ve been gay because I listened to a lot of Broadway musicals. I don’t know why I’m not gay.
I’m hoping to do a Broadway musical on the life of Rasputin. He’s someone I can definitely identify with.
I grew up dreaming of being on Broadway and being able to do that – and ‘Hamilton’ – was awesome, and it was the hardest thing for the first few weeks, and then it was the easiest thing.
Frances McDormand is my favorite actor. I don’t know if that’s relevant. But she’s a person who plays people. In other words, not everything has to be an over-the-top Broadway musical to get my attention, but it certainly helps.
Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.
Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical – I like the music. I saw ‘Mamma Mia;’ I saw ‘Les Miserables;’ I saw ‘Phantom of the Opera’ like six, seven times.
American Ballet Theatre’s rehearsal studios are at 890 Broadway, an old building where exposed pipes clank and hiss in uneven accompaniment to piano music. The high ceilings wear a toupee of dust. The wall paint peels like a newbie ballerina’s toes.
Oh God, I would love to do Broadway, but I’m unfortunately not a very good singer.
I worked with Ismail Merchant on ‘The Mystic Masseur,’ I did ‘Sakina’s Restaurant,’ I’ve done plays, I’ve been on Broadway, I’ve done movies, I’ve done TV… but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as ‘The Daily Show’ has. It’s the nature of the beast.
I think the thing’s that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven’t come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50’s when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn’t win the Tony Award.
When I was on Broadway, I got really sick with walking pneumonia. I decided not to take my health for granted anymore and make it a priority. The great thing is, the pounds just started to fall off.
I grew up loving Broadway musicals. I’d put on my parents’ cast albums and stand on the stool and sing in the mirror.
I’m a kid that went to theater school. I thought I was going to be making my living doing plays regionally or in New York or on Broadway, and maybe if I got lucky I would do a movie here or there.
When you’re performing on Broadway every night, you’re so much more accessible to people in the industry. Everybody is going to know who you are.
Black people, if I may, we don’t get a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things outside the norm, outside of what is expected of us. Black women on Broadway are expected to put themselves downstage center and tear the roof off.
I did ‘Lone Star Love’ in 2007 with Randy Quaid, and that was supposed to come to Broadway at the Belasco and a marquee went up and everything… and it all fell apart, and that marquee came right down, and we got severance pay. And, it was very sad.
On Broadway and in the United States it’s very different – people crossover all the time into television. I think that we’ll get there [in London] in the end, but it has to start with who comes to see you in the musical and whether they can see beyond the dancing and the singing.
When I started making movies, they tried to change my name, but I had already made a name for myself in a couple of Broadway productions and in television, so I wouldn’t change it.
I sing Broadway stuff in the shower, mostly.
I don’t have regrets. I’ve never sat here and thought, ‘Gee, if only I’d done ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’ on Broadway, I would have been happier.’
Jazz isn’t dead yet. It’s the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it’s a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it’s coming out of the U.S., it’s not going to survive unless it’s got some jazz influence.
I never wanted to be a wrestler, I wanted to get into musical theater. I always wanted to be on Broadway.
I’d love to be on scripted TV shows and movies, but not just one – I want to be in a lot of them! I’d also love to sing and possibly be on Broadway. I want to do it all.
I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.
When you’re on Broadway, what’s kind of the whole point is that you find something new in the show each night.
Broadway is another monster. I’ve been touring since I was 12 years old and I love being on the road – one day you’re here, next day it’s snowing, and the next you are in a desert and it’s 110 degrees. So I guess I’m kind of used to the madness physically that you go to when you are an entertainer. But it’s been great.
The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do in my entire life is to be on Broadway.
I was in a Broadway musical called Big Time Buck Wright.The play didn’t make it but I was a success. It lasted six days but I sung four songs and there were critics, seriously, in New York who said that my part was perfect. So I can beat Joe Frazier singing.
I’ve never done regional theater, and I’m getting to make my Broadway debut as a principal, playing a pretty cool part, so there are probably people keeping an eye on me to see if I’ll trip up.
I so miss musical theater. Secretly, I’m in awe of Broadway performers.
I always wanted to be a Broadway star. That’s actually what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I wanted to be the 19-year-old sensation on Broadway. It took a little bit longer than that.
I already have a Tony for my Broadway concert in ’73. It’s one of the most precious things I’ve won.
There’s nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.
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.
I’m probably going to be ashamed to say this… It was a Sir Mix-a-Lot album. I think I was 12, 13. I had just enough money for the ‘My Posse’s on Broadway’ single, so I bought that single. That was the first thing I bought with my own money.
For a while, people couldn’t understand why I’d find them so fascinating, but I’d rather go to a trial than to a Broadway play. Now that we have Court TV, they see what I mean.
I was, like, this token teen angst child of Broadway. It’s so funny. What is that? I don’t even know. But I loved it.
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.
It’s every actor’s dream to work in a hit show on Broadway and also shoot a television show.
Mary Martin was Broadway’s biggest closet king. Everyone thought Ethel (Merman) was butch and maybe a lesbian, but she wasn’t. And everyone thought that lovely little Mary was Miss Femme, and she was — except next to her gay husband. In other words, don’t judge a star by her cover.
Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn’t matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.
I did a Broadway show with Alan Alda and how much money can Alan Alda have.
I always, always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that, when I got a mini-series, I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob.
From 1985 to 1994, I lived in Manhattan in a big old loft right off Times Square. I could walk to work, which was in a couple of Broadway theaters, to Howard Stern’s studio, and to 30 Rock for ‘Letterman’ and ‘SNL.’ Even in New York, walking to work is homey and folksy, like living in a small town.
It doesn’t matter how late you get home or how wired you are, you still wake up early with your kids. That’s the most important thing you do in a day, whether or not you’re in a hit Broadway show.
I did ‘Fences’ off-broadway at the Beacon Theater, so it’s amazing that Denzel Washington and Viola Davis brought it to Broadway.
My parents were really, really cool about supporting what I wanted to do at a really young age. I think I was about 10 when I caught the bug. They would drive me down to New York if there were auditions. When I was 12, I did this show on Broadway called ‘High Society,’ so we moved to New York for the run of that.
You could drive a rental car until you don’t want it. Just get out of it while it’s moving and just walk away. No, I don’t feel like being in that car any longer. Just call Hertz. Hi, your car is drifting into the intersection of 28th and Broadway, if you’re interested. It’s now your problem.
Broadway has been very good to me. But then, I’ve been very good to broadway.
Burlesque thrived during the Great Depression, and by extension, so, too, did Gypsy [Rose Lee]. Men could no longer afford to pay $5.50 to see a show on Broadway, but they could scrape together $1.00 for a matinee at a burlesque house.
Broadway needs to let go of any fear that it won’t succeed and take a knee. There’s this rhetoric about being grateful and happy that you’re getting paid for your art. We are told to put our own stuff aside, but doesn’t everyone have a job they should just shut up and do?
I spent four months once doing a play on Broadway.
As a kid, I was obsessed with Broadway cast recordings, and I would totally mimic and memorize every little choice that these actors made.
If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn’t work, you’re a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn’t sound great to me!
If you have something important to say, Broadway and New York are great places to say it.
Broadway’s a little different from Houston, but it’s not a big difference.
My story is so boring: Long Island Jewish parents take their daughters to Broadway.
I mean these people who work on Broadway, in my opinion, are the most gifted of everyone. I mean they really know how to dance. They really know how to act. They really know how to sing. They know how to perform.
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.
There’s been so much talk in the news lately about illegal aliens in the workplace. When was the last time an illegal alien stole your job? Oh yeah, that dream job of the Chinese Delivery man pedaling up Broadway delivering Chinese food for 40 cents an hour, or on the back of a landscaping truck with 15 others.
So did my time on Broadway after the Xscape tour doing ‘Chicago’. Performing eight times a week put in the mindset of being onstage again.
I suppose a certain degree of adulthood has entered my life. Aiming for Broadway, I can’t think that way any more. Of course, Broadway will always be important. But it’s not the focus of everything that you do. You know, I’m very happy I was born when I was, so I got there in time. When it was time to get there.
I like singing as much as I like acting, and all through high school I thought I might be a Broadway singer.
What’s the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit – taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington – has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.
When I’m working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art – whether it be a museum, a Broadway show – or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.
Singing is more of a hobby than really something I want to do for a career. But I love musical theater, so I’m hoping I can go back to it and do a role on Broadway for a few weeks. That would be a dream come true. My dream role would be Roxie in ‘Chicago.’
My dream job would be starring in a lead role on a Broadway musical.
I don’t think just funny is enough on Broadway.
I grew up singing, and I played on Broadway to thousands of people, you know what I mean?
But I can’t wait to watch the Tonys this Sunday. I’m really glad Broadway is doing so well this year, especially with its straight plays. It’s been a wonderful year.
Whether it’s animated, whether it’s live-action, whether it’s Broadway, whether it’s television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.
Being on Broadway is the modern equivalent of being a monk. I sleep a lot, eat a lot, and rest a lot.
Broadway is really my life.
After I saw ‘Annie’ on Broadway, I came out of the show crying, because I wanted to be on that stage.
What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
Christopher Walken was probably the most experienced dancing partner I’ve had in movies, because he has the same background as I do. He’s from theatre, Broadway and off-Broadway, and we both shared that.
When I made my Broadway debut, I was still cleaning houses, something I’d done since I went out on my own at 15.
The financial side of Broadway is the easy part. Plenty of people want to put money in a Broadway show. The challenging part is finding the material that excites me enough to spend a couple of years of my life devoted to it.
I wanted to be on Broadway, but in musical comedy.
One of my dreams has always been to be in a Broadway musical.
There’s a mythical status to the Tony Awards. When you’re growing up as an actor, you hear about Broadway and the Tonys, but it’s not something you ever expect to experience.
Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it’s more casual but more interesting.
I remember when I was in ‘Hairspray’ – my first Broadway show – I truly was in awe of the voices I got to hear on a nightly basis around me. I’m thinking, ‘Wow! Why aren’t these people selling millions of records?’ They’re the ones that are out there, you know, belting their faces off!
By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it’s never been central.
I would love to be in musical theater and be on Broadway. If someone were to offer me a position to do something like that, I wouldnt pass it down. Im a huge fan of musicals and I really want to do that.
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.
I figured as I got older, the good roles for women would be in the theatre. So 15 years ago I started building a Broadway career to try and develop the chops to be accepted as a great theatrical actress.
I believe I’ve still got lots and lots to do. When I left Herman’s Hermits in 1973, I said one day I’m gonna be in a Broadway show, and I thought it would be in 1974. Then, it took me ten years to do it, but I didn’t ever quit.
Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
I’m really excited about the revolution that is young people actually playing young people on Broadway.
When I talk to young people who want to go to Broadway or whatever, I say, “The highs are very high and the lows are very low and then there is a lot in between.”
Everybody gets to a stage when it’s time to move on. I was bored, and the band wasn’t going anywhere, so I left. I did a couple of shows on Broadway and some other things. I was busy. I just wasn’t making records.
I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize.
Many years ago, I was in a Broadway show and I had to wear a fox fur around my shoulders. One day my hand touched one of the fox’s legs. It seemed to be in two pieces. Then it dawned on me…. her leg had probally been snapped in two by the steel trap that had caught it.
I saw ‘Hairspray’ at the Pantages in L.A. It came to the Pantages right before I did the movie, and just being in New York sometimes and seeing the marquees and everything like that, I’m like, ‘I really, really have to go experience a Broadway play.’
Live theater is my favorite of all the mediums that I have worked in, so I have every intention on coming back to Broadway.
I sing; I started my career at 9 years old in ‘Les Miserables’ on Broadway.
Broadway, in my opinion, is a microcosm of America. Those challenges that we have in our country, I think we still have those challenges on the Broadway stage. I think there are far too few African-American directors working on Broadway.
People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.
Yeah, I feel sort of unfinished in New York, even though I spent so many years there. I think it’s because I never got a chance to do any Broadway, or even off-Broadway. I would love to do that and I haven’t given up on that.
We’re actually thinking about distributing ‘Moon Over Broadway’ on-line. It’s tempting, because when you go to a major studio, it’s sort of like a farm, you know? They make all the money, since it’s kind of a buyer’s market.
When I was on Broadway, people would really just recognize me around the theater. When you’re showing up on commercials and posters, the scope of people recognizing you gets a little wider.
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.
What I like about Broadway is that you are still entertaining. You’re standing in front of an audience every night and the critics are not friends at all – and that’s good for me as an entertainer because I want to grow. It also gives me the structure of remaining in one city so I can get creative in different ways.
Nathan Lane’s Bus of Broadway Fun will be leaving shortly.
Broadway! Broad-way! I don’t aspire to the middle. I aspire to the tip-tip-top of it all.
I wanted to write for Broadway.
I’m inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.
I’ve had offers for Broadway and Hollywood musicals, but I do not want to take just any musical. I want the musical that’s right for me when I’m right for it.
I love country songs. I love Broadway.
I don’t think I’ve got the stuff that Broadway musicals are made of. But there are definitely many musicals that I enjoy. ‘Hair’ and ‘Rent’ might be my favorites.
I’m excited to flex my Broadway muscles – it keeps you alive as an actor.
I would love to go into musicals. I got a chance to sing in ‘Big Momma’s House,’ and that’s something I would love to do more. But only in Broadway or in the movies. I don’t think I would ever seek a career as a singer.
I love and respect theatre, so I am truly honored to have the opportunity to take my voice to the Broadway stage.
Oh, I am such a nerd when it comes to music – I only listen to Broadway!
I thought I’d be doing weird, Off Broadway theater after I graduated.
I was crying because I was making my Broadway debut and there’s nothing like that. It’s the absolute mountaintop for a nerd like me that’s loved it forever.
I like the fact that some of your favorite Broadway musicals are not made into movies.
