I'm a Brooklyn guy onstage, and I try to really feed my fans with the kind of material they expect from me.
It's physically very, very, very trying to be onstage as a performer, not unlike an athlete, for thirty years.
I have people come onstage and ask me questions and I get to meet them. That's one of the reasons I like it. When you're performing, when you're doing your movies, they're not there with you.
However I am is however I am. When you see me onstage or in the press, there's not a lot of thought and calculation that goes into it.
I didn't know how to grab your best material and put it together into a comedy set. I would just choose subjects and do it onstage. That's what I learned. I didn't know how to put a set together.
In underground music, there seems to be this real inability for people to express themselves in any kind of heroic or mythological way. There's this idea that we're all normal joes, and that creating a persona onstage or having schtick is somehow false and misleading and evil.
I was in the original cast of Wicked, and that got a bad review in The New York Times, and it’s the most successful thing that’s ever been put onstage.
I don't need the money after 11 years on 'Frasier,' and there aren't that many great roles onstage left for somebody my age. I'm more interested in playing those roles than I am in playing bit parts in movies.
In a strange way, I'm way more comfortable onstage than anywhere else.
My mother was electric onstage, and I vividly recall the extraordinary power she had over her audiences
Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.
I always enjoyed the feeling of being onstage - the magic that comes. When I hit the stage it’s like all of a sudden a magic from somewhere just comes and the spirit just hits you and you just lose control of yourself.
If I had my way, I'd always be onstage. But I won't always be able to be onstage.
Instead of acting in court, I decided to act onstage.
I've figured out what to do with my hands. . . onstage. I'm a percussion player, so I grab a tambourine as much as I can.
I've been onstage once for one performance with four days' rehearsal.
My experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.
I've never been onstage in my life.
When I'm onstage doing standup, no one yells "Cut!" or tells me what to do. I'm DeRay, and I use my own words. With acting, you're portraying a character with someone else's words. Still, you definitely want to inject a little of yourself into every role.
When I get onstage in a play, I feel very safe, very protected, very fulfilled.
