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?
The worst moment was when I was performing and I was about to sing, but I choked. I had a tickle in my throat and I started coughing, and I couldn’t get the words out. It lasted for like thirty seconds, but I got over it, and luckily the crowd didn’t seem to care.
My mother asks when I will do some theatre, and there is something about getting your 15 minute call. That is what you become an actor for – performing in front of people and getting the love from the audience.
I’ve always been one for show business. I like performing, and I used to get criticized for having production value. But now it’s all that! People need to get what they pay for! Otherwise, just listen to recorded music.
I just love the thrill of performing on stage. I believe that singing is something I was put here to do.
I tend to stay up late, not because I’m partying but because it’s the only time of the day when I’m alone and don’t have to be performing.
Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as ‘Stardust’ and ‘The Christmas Song’ that it’s hard to imagine anyone else performing them.
If players are performing for you, their age shouldn’t really matter, especially because the older players can bring their experience to the table.
I’m thankful for performing as long as I am allowed.
Songwriters aren’t always performers, and even performing songwriters aren’t always the kind of show-biz performers you think they’d be.
So I would dance and she would sing, and it was kind of a family thing. Performing was part of our world.
Mum and Dad always wanted me to do whatever I was happy doing. I nearly went to art college at 16, but decided to do a BTEC in performing arts.
I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do ‘Jesus Christ Super Star’ in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.
I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga, they said I was very theatrical and they said, ‘You’re Gaga’.
Performing music live, there’s a certain magic to it.
My love of performing goes way back. My mom got me on ‘Romper Room’ when I was five – it was my favorite show. But they couldn’t control me. I would run up and smack the camera, and I’d jump around and do my little flips and routines. I wish I could get that tape now.
Every summer, around late July and into August, I find myself in Europe, performing at any festival that will have me.
Productivity is driven at the enterprise level. Better wages, better performing workplaces, are driven at the workplace level.
I went to a Canadian college for performing arts and then I auditioned for Canadian Idol. That honestly was my golden ticket.
I always love performing live, and that’s what I was doing that started getting me acting parts, so I still find time do it.
It’s kind of an art, going out and performing. I’d like fans to remember me as a guy who would go out and entertain them, give them quality matches, and not just the same old garbage every week.
I was admired by all these hippies, and it was wonderful playing at Monterey and Woodstock, performing for half a million people.
I went to a performing arts school, and we studied musical theater, jazz vocal performance, and they kind of start you out on those things because they feel like it is a good foundation, and it was.
Originally the dream was about traveling and developing a job that would permit me to travel. And I decided to go into street performing because it was a traveling job; it would let me go around the world.
I’d love to play a rock star in a movie, but for now, I’m not performing in public.
I was performing skin grafts and became interested in why skin wouldn’t graft permanently.
I was a 200-pound defensive back on Saturday, but after the season, I was performing ‘Lysistrata’ or ‘Fences.’
When you are successful, there is the pressure of performing consistently; when you are not, there is the pressure of coming back and doing well.
Obviously, fans are the beginning and end for any artist. The minute your fans embrace you and accept you, you begin this ride of being in music and having a career doing something you love. You get to go be a kid and live out your dreams by performing music for fans who come out to your shows.
When the Beatles cut old rock n’ roll, they were recording music still in their performing repertoire, and besides, they never thought of the music as old.
I’m addicted to the adrenaline of performing, and I think when you’re used to having that high, you look for it in other things.
Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they’re not there right now. They’re performing, but it’s muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.
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.’
The adrenaline of performing on stage to a crowd – there’s nothing like it.
I love live music and I love to see people’s faces when I’m performing.
Writing is a kind of performing art, and I can’t sit down to write unless I’m dressed. I don’t mean dressed in a suit, but dressed well and comfortably and I have to be shaved and bathed.
When I started performing in public, I was probably around 10 or 11.
My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.
Honestly, live is my favorite way of performing. Every show is a completely different energy.
For example, I wouldn’t hesitate to sit somebody down if he wasn’t performing, even if he was the No. 1 player in the world. I’ve been sat down before.
Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It’s not as if I sit down and play ‘Fire and Rain’ by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up… the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.
Attend with Diligence and strict Integrity to the Interest of your Correspondents and enter into no Engagements which you have not the almost certain Means of performing.
I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn’t necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn’t ever really seen before.
I hate performing on live television. It’s so scary, because, if you screw up, you don’t really get any retakes. So when I do television shows now, having been on ‘Idol’ really helps me mentally to just kind of take it all in. So I learned a lot from it.
Performing, not rehearsing, is a dancer’s raison d’etre, and I’ve been lucky to ‘etre’ in some extraordinary places – Cuba, Paris, Mongolia. In particular, a two-week stint in Greece leaps to mind. We danced in the Acropolis’s Herodes Atticus amphitheater, once a venue for gladiator spectacles.
I’m coming up on 30. There are other things that I want to pursue outside of just performing.
When you’re performing, you’re playing to the back row. With acting, you have to be more nuanced.
Because I started my career in improv, performing with Second City and the Ace Trucking Company, I always enjoy being in situations where – as an actor – you have to think fast & be light on your feet.
I was a dancer first, which made me realize how much I loved performing.
When people are performing in a musical, everybody is intuitively drawn to the right pitch. You don’t want to be too broad that people can’t relate to it, so it has to have some grounding in the real world.
I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I honestly started performing for my family when I was around three. I would jump up on the coffee table and I would get in the closet and ask that they introduce me to come out, and from that point on, my mother stuck me in dance class and children’s theater.
I never knew that I would be performing on talk shows with Sia.
I haven’t been to many music events where somebody was performing and it actually made me cry.
Performing live is not my favourite. I am more of a recording person; I prefer to be private. I didn’t mind doing videos, even if they came very close with the camera. I can take that, but walking on stage in concert and singing live, that is a bit difficult.
I love performing outside because it’s as if the heavens are open and the elements become part of the stage show as well – you know, the wind and the rain and the thunder. It’s almost as if there’s a sense of invocation in performance.
I like radio and live performing stuff. I don’t like the television stuff as much.
I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.
I’d love to go back to Greek times and see the birth of theater and performing, in that time. It would be so extraordinary to see the need that theater came out of, in the first place. I think we could probably all learn a bit from that.
