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?
In a play, a man comes out and says something. Another man comes out and says something. And by the end of the night, we've learned something we didn't know, In a musical, there is singing and dancing for two hours, but you've got to know everything in 5 minutes. Do it in those 5 minutes or you'll lose them.
I was doing a Broadway play, and I was really new to this business. The Broadway play was my first job, literally. The play next door was a musical called Falsettos. The director got hired to direct this Michael J. Fox movie and was looking for a kid who could play brash and salty and mean [in Life With Mikey].
I would love to do a non-musical Broadway or Off-Broadway play.
I have written a lot of musical theatre over my life - two Olivier Award-winning musicals - and I still don't think I'm ready to be the boss in the room.
I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting.
Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth."
But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.
I'm a weird dichotomy of nerd, sports fan, and musical theater, so I'd love to do a superhero musical on Broadway. But all the good superheroes are claimed.
Broadway has changed tremendously from the early days when the shows were referred to as musical comedies. Musical Theater is now a more expanded art form. Back then, singer/actors were not the norm. From the 60's to now, it is necessary to do it all to be a consummate Broadway performer.
What a thrill it was to play opposite Maurice Evans in this brilliant, dazzling musical, based on the life of two of the greatest personalities in stage history.
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door... Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots.
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.
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.
There have been several television movies, 'Carrie 2,' two musicals! I remember thinking, the first time there was a musical on Broadway, 'Oh my gosh! The people who ordinarily go to the theaters, that's not really the audience.'
Probably my two biggest musical influences were the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, in chronological order. Both of them have had a very simple-sounding musical style that's actually quite complex as far as popular songs are concerned.