What's the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit - taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington - has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.
We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles.
I love Chicago. It's one of the great cities. I'm crazy about the town. It reminds me of New York when it was at its best, the New York that used to be and is no more. I love the architecture, the old stuff and the new stuff.
I've been back in New York a year and a half now. Before that I was on the West Coast for five years. There's no comparison between the two. You hear things in New York you don't hear anywhere else. Unless these guys go out. Quite a few make it out to the Coast. Of course, you can't stay in New York for ever. You have to move.
My mum is very political - left wing - and my dad was in the advertising business. They were both from the East Coast: Boston and New York City, respectively.
I was a mixture of a country boy and a town boy, really. Chichester is a town on the coast of England, and I grew up all along that strip of coast that Chichester branches out into. Sometimes I was living in a house in the country, and sometimes I was living in a town.
New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.
New York means many different things to me. It certainly means cheesecake, more species of cheesecake than I ever knew existed: rum, orange, hazelnut, chocolate marble, Italian, Boston, and of course, New York.
As a U.S. History major, there is something very cool about being in cities, and walking the streets of Philadelphia or Boston or New York and seeing historical sites.
I started freelancing for Serious Eats while I was still living in Boston. I was born there, grew up in New York City, but went back to Boston for school, and then I lived in Boston for about ten years.
I have friends in New York that won't leave New York, and they're really talented people, but they'd rather take an acting class in New York than do a play in Florida or Boston. That's just weird to me, but they get into that I've-got-to-be-in-the-center-of-the-universe mentality. I'm not that way.
When you travel around the country, you see what a tough town New York is: rude, competitive, a town where good, logical ideas are ignored in favor of unworkable ones. And yet, all these other towns are so dead and boring compared to New York.
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
It always astounds me that over the course of my career, and having lived in four comedy cities - New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles - there's very few people I haven't run into.