As soon as there are 200 people in a theater watching me, I get really scared.
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
I think that theater is the closest medium to music. It's very pure. It's for the elite of the society. It's not for everyone in the society.
I do think that theater is a great venue for science fiction, and not just adaptations but also original work. I also think some of the greatest classics of theater have elements of SF, but in theater, as in publishing, sometimes people make arbitrary distinctions.
I don't believe in lowest common denominators. Our focus has been on delivering value. We're rarely going to be the cheapest theater in a market. We strive to be the best.
There's no greater feeling than people coming up to me and going, "Man, my father was dying, and we went to see Rush Hour, and it was the greatest night we had in years together. We sat in that theater and we laughed for two hours without stopping. That was just a great memory that I had before my father died. "
The theater is reaching as many different demographics as it can now.
I don't think about going back to the theater.
I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.
That's what I tell young actors. "You don't have to compromise. Go do some theater and wait for an appropriate role. "
What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.
Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them.
Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.
I thought I'm going to die. So why can't I do everything? And what is this idea that I worked all day yesterday, so I'm tired today? I've never believed that. I thought, "Just suppose I could choreograph a ballet. " And I did it. Suppose I could teach dance at the theater in Cleveland. And I did it. Suppose I could sing for a living - that I could stop these two jobs as a waitress and a salesperson.
One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.
It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater… it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.
My mother's a genius. She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had; paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter. You know, she just kept feeding it to me. So we went to see all kinds of theater. We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch.
The primary function of a theatre is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
Simplify, slow down, be kind. And don't forget to have art in your life - music, paintings, theater, dance, and sunsets.