A Quote by Debbie Millman

If I'd had more courage, I would've pursued a less commercial path. Maybe I would've gone into musical theater. — © Debbie Millman
If I'd had more courage, I would've pursued a less commercial path. Maybe I would've gone into musical theater.
If I had my life to live over, I would try to make more mistakes. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of very few things that I would take seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would go more places. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less spinach. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary troubles.
I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I want to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think, also, because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the men who do musical theater differently than we treat the women in musical theater.
They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.
Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.
If I had been a different sort of person, maybe less impressionable, less intense, less fearful, less utterly dependent upon the perceptions of others - maybe then I would not have bought the cultural party line that thinness is the be-all and end-all of goals. Maybe if my family had not been in utter chaos most of the time, maybe if my parents were a little better at dealing with their own lives maybe if I'd gotten help sooner, or if I'd gotten different help, maybe if I didn't so fiercely cherish my secret, or if I were not such a good liar, or were not quite so empty inside... maybe.
I think if I was less exigent with myself, maybe I would be more productive, because I would put less pressure on my shoulders.
I'm really eager to go back and do some theater. I would love to do some more comedy as well because I think that's really the hardest thing to do; it's what I grew up doing, and I would love to go back and do that. I did a lot of theater growing up - musical theater.
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.
I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the theater the minute I graduated from college having not pursued it! So I went back to school and got a degree in music and began working in musical theater.
I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that's what I did.
I have intentionally not pursued musical theater.
I knew if I had gone to school - if I had gone to Juilliard and danced for four years - I would have spent every day wondering what would have happened if I had gone to Los Angeles instead.
In my own life, I had gone from Maryland State Honors Chorus and writing and singing my own songs to a musical silence. It seemed the busier my work life would get, the less I had to feed the other parts of my own soul, including the arts.
I got hit up for a tampon commercial and so I asked [JD and Jo] if they had anything. Jo sent that over and I was like, "I love this track. Oh my god. It's so upbeat. It's so positive. It would be so great for a tampon commercial." That commercial never came through, so then I just had it. I was like, "That would be great for a Hillary [Clinton] song." I think it's so funny that it could be a tampon commercial.
IF - and this is the greatest of them all - I had the courage to see myself as I reallyam, I would find out what is wrong with me, and correct it, then I might have a chance to profit by my mistakes and learn something from the experience of others,for I know that there is something WRONG with me, or I would now be where I WOULD HAVE BEEN IF I had spent more time analyzing my weaknesses, and less time building alibis to cover them.
Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some gods would dream of.
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