I want to toy around with producing a Broadway show.
In the seventies when I was struggling, I ate the same thing every day at Big Nick’s Burger Joint on Broadway and 77th Street. A cottage-cheese omelette with tomatoes, French fries, rye toast, orange juice, and coffee. It was consistently the most satisfying meal I could possibly imagine.
I watched Mark Rylance in the Broadway revival of ‘La Bete,’ and it knocked my socks off. The complete commitment, passion, and unbridled enjoyment in every moment of what he was doing was overwhelming.
I miss singing. I did Broadway forever.
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.
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’ve had such an amazing opportunity to work on so many different types of projects that continued on to Broadway. Unfortunately I didn’t always continue on with them. Still, you know, I always had such a great pride in kind of helping the authors and directors create the show.
As soon as I saw ‘Chinglish’ on Broadway, I began to envision this smart and insightful cross-cultural comedy as a film.
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?
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!
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 think that much of the success of the Broadway mounting of ‘Newsies’ was due in no small part to the infectious camaraderie on stage between the boys.
One of the boring tricks about capturing Broadway onscreen, actually, is just about all the different unions.
I’m not denying that it’s exciting to have a play on Broadway.
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.
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.
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.
I think ‘Hand to God’ is going to change the landscape of Broadway. I think Broadway, truthfully, will never be the same.
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!
I couldn’t be more excited about doing ‘Kinky Boots’ on Broadway; it’s going to be a delicious challenge!
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.
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.
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.
I thought about doing ’36 Chambers’ on Broadway.
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.
Because I’m an American woman, and I write straight plays, it’s always been sort of assumed I would never be done on Broadway. But that was never the goal.
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.
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.
When I look around at Broadway and the West End, theatre is becoming an exclusive club.
Broadway is a very different kind of place. It’s kind of like Nashville in that there’s a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.
All of a sudden, I was a young kid in my early 20s, and I had a couple of Broadway shows to my credit.
It’s a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
I would like to play Broadway!
‘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.
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.
Have you seen the Broadway version of ‘The Lion King?’ Go and see it. That’s where the future of musical is.
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.
I am almost famous in China, because I have that Broadway cachet.
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.
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.
It’s every actor’s dream to work in a hit show on Broadway and also shoot a television show.
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.
We didn’t go to Broadway musicals when I was growing up; it was too expensive.
I love going to Broadway shows.
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.
Broadway was weird.
In 2005, I played Count Fosco in ‘The Woman In White’ on Broadway. It was a disaster. I was physically run down and terribly homesick and I just knew I had to leave. I lasted three months before the producers released me.
When ‘night, Mother’ opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.
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.
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.’
Broadway performers are the best-trained people on the planet.
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.
If my 12-year-old self knew that there was going to be a Broadway adaptation of ‘Newsies,’ I would have freaked out.
Film is much more of a brand business, whereas on Broadway, you can do complete unknowns and have hits.
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.
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.
