My background is musical theater. I have a BFA from the University of Florida.
But do let me reiterate the spirit of Michigan. It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan men to spread the gospel of their university to the world's distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours.
Neither my MFA from Yale School of Drama nor my BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University make me any different from other actors in film, television, or theatre.
I've always loved musical theatre. I've always been a big kind of closeted musical theatre nerd. I really have always dreamed about being able to do musical theatre.
I had full rank scholarship to the University of Michigan, which anybody in the north will tell you, I don't know anyone that has had that at the University of Michigan, which tells you that I was a stand up student.
In college, I actually majored in Musical Theater. I was pursuing a BFA in Musical Theater.
I came to musical theatre from straight acting, and a lot of my friends have a real prejudice about musical theatre - one I probably shared.
Musical theatre goes through cycles. I came in when it was at the absolute height of musical theatre as I remember it. It was the age of the long-runners.
I went to Boston University and got my BFA, and performed Off Broadway.
I have been personally victimized by organized disruption of a public lecture on a university campus - at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michigan State University, and Rhode Island's Providence College, to name only a few.
I didn't go to university. I studied theatre in high school and worked with Canberra Youth Theatre and The Street Theatre and other theatre organisations in Canberra, and that's how I got my training.
Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
I'm not sure I approve of theatre as a university course. I think theatre's something you do. I mean, literature is a subject; theatre is practical.
It seems like pop singing has sort of influenced musical theatre in so many ways - you could argue good or bad, really - and musical theatre is written for that style so often, which is a completely different style.
After high school, I went to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point for a year, and I studied musical theatre. By that point, I was like, 'This is what I want to do.'
I used to do puppet theatre and also mime and musical theatre in Florida for competitions and festivals, which was great. I was very much involved in theatre when I was in college.