A Quote by Michael Stuhlbarg

I was thrown into a community production of 'Bye Bye Birdie' or something when I was a kid. I wanted to just build the sets, but I wasn't allowed to just build the sets unless I auditioned for the play. So I auditioned for the play and was thrown into the chorus. During the course of that I fell in love with it, and I never really turned back.
When I auditioned for 'Bye Bye Birdie' on Broadway, Gower Champion said, 'You've got the job!' I said, 'Mr. Champion, I can't dance.' He said, 'We'll teach you what you need to know.'
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?'
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If you get operated, something can go wrong and you can just say bye-bye to tennis. That's what happened to a lot of soccer players in Europe. They get operated, some things, it's not the mistake of the doctor. It's just some surgeries, they just don't go the right way...My injury will never go away. It's already become so chronic there's no chance to fix it so I can play without pain.
My first audition ever was for 'Bye Bye Birdie' in fifth grade.
I met my wife in 1990 when I was on the national tour of 'Bye, Bye Birdie.'
I remember, in middle school, we did the musical 'Oliver.' I loved the movie, and I always wanted to play Oliver. It might not have been stated, but the boys auditioned for Oliver, and the girls auditioned for Nancy. But we also did a play called 'Li'l Abner,' and I was really excited that they let me put on a suit and a fake mustache.
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.'
I feel like what we love to do is solve problems. If it's easy to solve, we find a more difficult one. There's always a way. In our world, we can build stuff. We can build more sets than you could ever build in live-action. We can build more props just for custom angles or perspectives. We'll build special trees for that, paint a sky. There's really no limitations, except that you run out of time and money at some point.
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.
I transitioned into theater and acting when I was about 9, community theater and musicals, being, like, chorus-kid-number-78 or whatever. But I just loved it. As a kid you just crave attention, and early on I just felt it was so cool and fun to play around and have people clap for me. But eventually I grew up and fell deeper into it.
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.
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