A Quote by Billy Porter
I love the community of theater. There is something about the camaraderie: People who show up eight times a week to do a show. It's unlike any other business. It's just lovely. You feel like you're in a family.
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Many movie stars or American Idol contestants sort of fall into theater... and say, 'Oh, yeah, I would love to do theater.' And then they get here and say, 'Oh, wait a minute, this actually is a craft!' It's not just show up one day and do it. It's show up eight times a week, twice on Wednesdays and twice on Saturdays.
The Broadway community is unlike any community in show business and it is unlike any community in the world. When you come into the Broadway community they open the door and they say "welcome". Not only do they do that, but when times are really tough and horrendous things have happened and really tragic things - the Broadway community shows up! And they say "how can we help?".
I didn't plan on going into show business. Show business picked me. And it's been fun. One of the best things about being in show business is people think they know me, and they feel like they grew up with me.
I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else's lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.
I think the thing that I wish somebody would ask me is just to ask about the business side of the radio show. I feel like I actually work very hard to make sure the business side of the radio show runs, and no one has any interest in how a public radio show is run. And rightly so.
We like to keep the show small. Honestly, where we moved the show to the UCB theater, we moved it to a smaller space. Even though the show has technically gotten more popular. And that is, only because we like intimacy and the ability to experiment more. We don't want to be like, "We can get 250 people in a week. So let's do that. But we have to be careful about who we book..."
I think at a certain point we a little bit forgot that it was a pot show. I think I said something to Harry [Elfont], around Episode 7 [of mary and Jane], I was like, "We have a pot show. Nobody is smoking any weed." There is literally a shot in the season finale where everybody lights up at the same time. I was like, "I feel like we are not honoring our concept." It just became a show. It became a show about these two girls doing this crazy thing and getting into all these adventures and it was really not about the weed.
I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to make the show, and that it is in alignment with what I'm interested in, with what I read about. For me, it just felt like an organic step - of course, I'm thinking I want a show that allows for more representation for the community and shows the struggles people face, especially when we're hearing all this political rhetoric - to have a way to show how much this affects people lives.
There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.
For years, people have been trying to talk to me about doing a show, and I wouldn't do one because I'm a serious business guy. I'm not going to do a stupid show. So, the opportunity came up with CNBC, and we started talking. It became a real business show. It's educational, people watch it, and it's great for small business.
It's interesting to me because theater is, on any given day, 10,000 times harder than film and television. And that's not to say film or television can't be hard or challenging; it's emotional to do the same thing over and over and over. But in terms of stamina, there is nothing like an eight-show week to separate the men from the boys.
You don't get a lot of life milestones in show business. It's really difficult to make things, and a lot of times you don't know you're at the end of something. With Mr. Show, I was only a writer and we knew we were going into the movie, and we thought, "Okay, like Monty Python, we're going to make five movies." And we didn't know it was the end. So it ended up being a bummer and such a terrible ending for Mr. Show. We never got to feel like, "Wow, we did it! We did something."
I think theater probably remains my favorite, sort of where my soul lives. It takes a lot of discipline, and you have to show up eight shows a week, no matter how you feel physically, mentally, emotionally - there's nobody to cut around that: you've got to tell the story yourself for two hours.
Honestly, I try to forget Fashion Week once it's over. I just want to go home and rest and just forget I even did it. It could drive you crazy! It's just show after show after show, and you're missing your family and they feel really far away. You don't go to sleep. You work for a month.
My brain does like the idea of hosting a late-night show. My brain does like the idea of maybe having a show about me. So, I often pitch ideas and work on scripts and do that just because I may not be right about how I feel, so why not just do this, and if it happens and I got my own show, well maybe I would really end up falling in love with it.
There's something about that idea of looking up and hoping, and thinking, 'I'm good.' Some things, like show business, are absolutely subjective. People look at a TV show and think, 'I could do that.' And maybe they could do that. But they're not.
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