We did a lot of high school productions. My first was 'Twelfth Night.' I played Viola. We did 'Much Ado About Nothing' and 'Taming of the Shrew,' and a lot of musicals: 'The Wiz,' 'Bye Bye Birdie,' 'Oliver.'
The first role that I played as a musical - I was 14 years old, and I played Birdie in 'Bye Bye Birdie.' That was an awakening of, 'Wow, I'm good at that. People are responding.' And I hardly knew what I was doing back then, but there was something that people were seeing.
I wasn't originally taking drama, but the drama teacher asked me to audition for Bye, Bye Birdie. I did and got the lead role. Initially I was kind of scared, but once I did it I got bitten by the bug and loved it.
My first audition ever was for 'Bye Bye Birdie' in fifth grade.
If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.
First I wanted to be an ice skater, and then I saw 'Bye, Bye Birdie,' and everything changed. I'm glad I learned through the process of theater.
I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
But yeah, I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'
I met my wife in 1990 when I was on the national tour of 'Bye, Bye Birdie.'
I'm not a singer. In 'Bye Bye Birdie,' I think I was the sad girl who sits on the park bench during 'Put on a Happy Face.'
We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.
Initially, I wanted to be an ice skater, but then when I was 13 I saw Bye Bye Birdie, and that was it - I wanted to be on Broadway.
When I was growing up, I had a nanny who would always play 'The Sound of Music' and 'Bye Bye Birdie,' so I was always listening to that stuff.
Everybody's talking about ministers, sinisters, banisters, and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis, and popeyes, bye-bye, bye-byes.
I got to play Kim in Bye Bye Birdie, Sandy in Grease, and Maria in The Sound of Music. And it was so much fun for me, but the thing that I looked forward to the most was at the cast parties. After the shows they had karaoke machines set up and that's when I could sing country music.
Once in 1979, [Zbigniew] Brzezinski gave an important slogan: "Bye-bye PLO." After two months, I was in Tehran saying to him: "Bye-bye Brzezinski." Who can imagine that America will lose one of its strongest bases?