I've loved musicals ever since I saw 'The Lion King' on Broadway.
I know, it's weird that I've never done a musical. I turned down two of them. 'The Lion King' and 'The Producers.' I turned two of the biggest Broadway musicals down, am I a mess?
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.
There are no large-scale original musicals being made right now. They're all Broadway adaptations and jukebox musicals or catalog musicals, and they just don't interest me as much.
Have you seen the Broadway version of 'The Lion King?' Go and see it. That's where the future of musical is.
There is a tendency just to talk about foreign investors. Over 80 per cent of new investment in the South African economy is South African and therefore the engagement of the South African investor is also a critical part of this process.
I've always known that I wanted to be an actor. My family kind of was a theatrically inclined family. My father came to New York when he was a young man to be an actor and he, over a course, was in a couple Broadway musicals. I grew up in family where theater was always part of the vocabulary. By the time I was a teenager I was just totally obsessed, and it was the only thing I could imagine myself doing.
We do not have a South African as a member of the African Commission. The President of the Commission comes from Mali, the Deputy comes from Rwanda and then we have got all these other members, ordinary commissioners. There is no South African there. And the reason, again, for that is not because we didn't have South Africans who are competent.
Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.
I always admired Hugh Jackman as an actor in movies but also in theatre because I'm a big fan of Broadway musicals.
I don't think I've got the stuff that Broadway musicals are made of. But there are definitely many musicals that I enjoy. 'Hair' and 'Rent' might be my favorites.
At a very early age I knew I wanted to be an actor and then more specifically that I wanted to be on Broadway and be in musicals.
I'm obsessed with 'Wicked', and I'd love to play Nala in 'The Lion King'. Some of the songs from 'The Lion King' are performed in my native tongue, so when the cast performed an extract from the show in 'Strictly' in the language I grew up with, it made me cry.
I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
The Lion King always makes me cry, especially when Simba's father gets trampled.
I grew up going to musicals with my mom here in New York, going to Broadway. I used to be in musicals in high school.