Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience’s imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there’s no fourth wall.
I like musicals and I love music.
I love musicals; I love the ballet, opera, the circus. It’s all performance to me.
I think ‘West Side Story’ is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, musicals ever put onscreen – or stage, for that matter. I, frankly, like Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ very much, too. I grew up with that… I loved it. I loved the score; I loved the acting.
I did a lot of stage plays and musicals, and my first proper acting job was on ‘Holby City’ when I was 15.
If you know what you want to do, as I always loved musicals, and then to have been lucky enough to be successful with them, I think that’s all you can ask isn’t it? I think I don’t really think too much about it. I am a bit shy socially, yeah, I admit that.
I think when you start analyzing trends and start making shows for a particular audience, you are making a fatal move. I think that’s why people are doing too many revivals, that’s why there’s a plethora of rock musicals. There’s room for everything, but not room for too much of anything.
I grew up on musicals, and I know they are quite the thing now, but I’m actually a little indignant, because I started taking singing lessons years ago – I put the time in!
Everything can’t be a postage-stamp-sized project. Everything can’t be a chamber piece. Musicals aren’t even meant to be that, or identified with it… It’s none of it simple.
It’s just about being an entertainer; it’s about having all those tools over the years to do all sorts: films, musicals, playing a bit of piano, running a quiz show – it just becomes part of the job.
I mostly did musicals and concerts when I was younger, and then I realized I don’t quite have the voice for it, so I went into acting, which I enjoy more.
Organized religion and musicals present tenets to live by that don’t entirely make sense but, on the whole, make people who believe them secure, thus giving an appearance of inclusiveness.
I didn’t really start going to see a lot of musicals and live theater probably until I was in seventh or eighth grade, maybe my first year of high school, and by that time I’d probably seen ‘Grease’ twice a year every year of my life.
I love musicals. I grew up on musicals.
As a father of five, I sometimes feel I’ve spent a lifetime watching Disney musicals.
My dream of dreams is to write Broadway musicals. All of this Twitter and TV writing is just a day job.
I’m not really into musicals.
I found acting when I was 14, when I got cast in the chorus in a high school play, ‘The Boyfriend.’ In my high school, we did mainly musicals, so I just started doing nothing but musicals for years and loved it.
Alice Ripley was someone who had had a huge effect on me when I had gotten out of college and decided that this was the road I wanted to take – to write musicals.
I grew up doing musicals in my childhood at school, along with all the plays I used to be involved in.
Musicals don’t get enough credit for being so surreal. It’s like an alternate universe.
I loved musicals, and I loved Barbra Streisand, and I loved Louis Malle. My tastes were very bizarre, but the thing they all had in common is that they took me out of my life and made me feel something.
I hate musicals. There, I said it.
I have done a couple of musicals myself over the years but have never done a Stephen Schwartz show, and I never thought I would be writing one.
Musicals and horror movies are my two favorite genres because they’re about extremes.
I played the trumpet for nine years, and then I joined the choir after that, and then I was in musicals in high school.
With a lot of contemporary musicals, the songs are like a calling card: the action stops for them.
We did a lot of high school productions. My first was ‘Twelfth Night.’ I played Viola. We did ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ and a lot of musicals: ‘The Wiz,’ ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ ‘Oliver.’
Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic – something true of religion, too.
When I decided that I will become a music director, the first thing I wanted to do was to make songs for Vishesh Films as I used to love their musicals. I had eight to ten songs which I had made only for them and fortunately ‘Sun Raha Hai’ from that list was liked by them and it actually opened doors for me.
Most of the musicals I go to I simply don’t enjoy, so I don’t go to them unless a number of people I trust say I have to.
I made all these great musicals with Judy Garland. It was all about me going into a barn and saying: ‘Let’s put on a show.’ That’s what me and Judy did.
Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
I definitely knew I wanted to be an actor in high school. I was doing plays and musicals, and I loved ‘Saturday Night Live’ and thought that was what I wanted to do – funny sketches and comedies. So I knew then, but I didn’t know how to go about it, but I found my way.
In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.
I was the lead in two musicals, and I took dance classes.
Outside football, I like to go to musicals or the theatre. My favourite one is the ‘Jersey Boys.’
I think I’m a straight actor who occasionally does musicals; most people think I’m an eccentric comedian. It’s amazing how many years you can spend in this business just sorting out something as simple and basic as that.
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.
I don’t think today’s younger audience… would even know what 1920s musicals were like.
I think musicals can be more than what people imagine. That’ll be the case with ‘Matilda.’ It’s such a clever thing to stage. Parents would have read this when they were young and will want to share it with their children because they have such a fondness for the source.
When I did musicals in London a number of years ago, I was in a workshop scenario for a year or more with ‘Bombay Dreams.’
I always loved soul music. My dad was a very religious guy, and we would listen to a lot of gospel and soul music. My college girlfriend introduced me to musicals. She listened to them, so that was the first time I heard ‘Dream Girls.’
When you’re doing the traditional musicals, singing songs that are 40 and 50 years old, you realize there’s a reason why those musicals are hits. These are amazing songs!
When I first started working at Disney animation, I can’t tell you how many people said to me, ‘Oh, man, take a powder.’ Nobody takes animated musicals seriously. I swear.
I love movie musicals because I think there is an amount of emotional honesty that’s needed to portray someone who feels so deeply that all they can do is break into song.
There are two things that I cannot resist: one is musicals and the other is a spaceship in trouble. But I am smart enough not to combine the two things.
I have not forgotten about my dreams to become a singer. If given the chance, I want to take part in a drama OST making and also try out for musicals.
I love musicals more than anything.
I started at home as a kid putting on shows and lip-syncing Michael Jackson for the grown-ups. Then, in musicals and plays in school. At 17, I was performing in coffee shops and in parking lots at Phish shows. At 18, I had a band that played local shows in the Northwest.
I remember really getting into ‘The Wiz’ and an old musical called ‘Purlie,’ which Melba Moore sang. I liked those roof-raising shows because I connected deeply with the gospel aspects of those musicals.
I majored in theater. I did plays. But musicals were not my thing.
The biggest myth I’d like to bust isn’t about me – it’s about musicals. So many people dismiss the entire art form through highbrow snobbery, but I think a lot of those people would be suprised if they actually saw some.
My father is a South African actor who danced in broadway musicals for ‘Lion King.’
The great thing about musicals is that they transcend race.
We’d go to studios with ideas to do movie musicals and they’d literally kick us out. They said, ‘Audiences aren’t interested in movie musicals. You’re wasting our time.’
I learned more about who I am and how to be a great worker – and a great artistic worker – from doing student theater. I was a stage manager. I was an assistant stage manager. I was on the running crew. I did probably 25 shows at Northwestern – all musicals, of course.
I viewed black musicals before ‘Jelly’ as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
I think a lot of big musicals close because of the rules they’re bound by that make it impossible for them to be efficient.
I don’t want to be entertained. I don’t want visuals or musicals. I don’t want a vacation. I don’t want to quit. I don’t want sympathy. The cry of my heart is ‘Just Give Me Jesus.’
