A Quote by Jennifer Damiano

I was pretty new to the Broadway world once I began working in it. I hadn't really grown up being too aware of that many shows or that many actors in shows. I was always obsessed with Judy Garland, though.
I grew up with the movies of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland - these are the kinds of shows and the kinds of numbers in shows that I dreamed of being in and doing when I was a kid.
I was keenly aware that I didn't want to draw on too many typically doomed aspects of the fated singer. Whether it's Judy Garland or Norma Desmond, there is this tragic quality to older women that one can revel in, and you want it to be more three-dimensional than that. So it was important for the character to be strong and resilient, because there are so many victims in opera.
Well, I was obsessed with Judy Garland growing up. Like, obsessed.
When we went to Judy Davis and said, 'We want you to play Judy Garland in the mini-series 'Life With Judy Garland,' she was shocked, but we just had an instinct about her.
I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.
Even good shows can fail to find an audience because they're drowned out by the noise and the sheer volume of everything that is being made. It's one of the downsides of there being, as I've argued, too many shows.
I don't go to that many Broadway shows, so I can't really say anything.
Basically, every band that makes it has some dude with some sense of business. I don't know if our band would've been so successful were it not for Daniel's [Kessler] insight into how things really work. Daniel was the one who was diligently saying, "We should make a demo, send it out, play shows but not too many shows, get on shows with touring bands that are coming to New York."
I grew up watching shows like 'Martin' and 'Fresh Prince' and 'Moesha,' and I was inspired by all these shows. When I was growing up, there were so many black people in TV. That's just the world I was around.
In '92, I got my first Broadway show as a performer - 'Crazy for You.' I was in the ensemble. In fact, I was in eight Broadway shows as a dancer. Seven of them were original shows. That's how I learned to create something from the ground up.
I've had the joy of working on critically acclaimed shows, but unfortunately, those shows aren't always in the Golden Globe or Emmy categories, which bums me out because they are really good, quality shows.
Before Disney, I did other shows so I was aware of the business. They're all the same in that they're a professional environment. The only difference between a Disney show and other network shows are in the age of the actors you're working with and the age of the intended audience.
Judy Garland is a singer with a capital S. And talk about soul. This woman was soul personified. Judy Garland is a class by herself.
I've always been fascinated, obsessed even, with books and TV shows about unsolved murders, cold cases, forensic science, mysteries, and so on. Many times when I get inspiration for my work, it's from something in one of these books or TV shows, or perhaps some newspaper article about a specific case.
I used to listen to Judy Garland all the time - I love Judy Garland and her music. But I started to realize that if you keep singing like that, singing songs of being victimized by love over and over and over again, it can't help but have a profound effect on your life.
I knew the full 'Judy Garland Carnegie Hall' double album set at age 2. And then my mother wondered why I was gay. I was like, 'Are you nuts? You would make me get on the table to sing Judy Garland songs and you're upset?'
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