DONNA LYNNE CHAMPLIN

A musical, in its true form, is where emotions reach a height where true spoken word cannot be enough, and you must sing. That's all it is. It's not posh; it's not out of your reach. It's the most visceral way to tell a story.

About six months after I moved to New York City, I was literally down to my last twenty dollars when a friend of mine from college got me a job at an Upper East side gym. I ran the cafe, and I was the janitor. It was an unfortunate combination of duties, to say the least.

To this day, I am so grateful I grew up in Rochester, New York.

I don't usually see my type for on-camera stuff as a series regular. Normally, my type is the janitor, the secretary, the cop, or the nurse.

Support women directors. When a play opens, and it's by a woman, put your money down.

Acting I never worried about, but it's so strange that on-camera work is so much more technical than theatre work, which I would have never thought in a million years.

What I miss about the theater is the live experience.

With shows with plus-sized characters, there are all of these lines of being jealous at so and so or mad at so and so for being skinny and their great diets. It's so all-encompassing and exhausting. I'm not saying that's not some women, but it's just not all of us.

The difficult thing with mental illness is that there's no one to blame. You can't blame a person who's mentally ill, because they didn't ask for it! There's no choice to it.

It's very limited what women who look like me can do on television. You don't often see 'my type' on television unless she's a sidekick - certainly not a three-dimensional series regular who is pertinent to the plot.

Phyllida Lloyd is probably the sweetest person on the planet.

There's pre-production, and the second part is when you start rehearsal. Pre-production was a very large learning curve for me.

Logistically, working on a television show and hitting your mark and leaning to your right and knowing where the camera is - I literally felt like I was on another planet.

If I could say anything to anybody out there thinking of creating their own content is to always, always, come from a place of authenticity.

I've become accustomed to not being cast for television and film because of how I look.

I've had a lot of therapy in my life.

My first job ever was selling balloons with my brother at parades when I was about six years old. My father wanted us to learn about money, how to make it, save it, spend it, etc.

As a gold-card-carrying member of the nerd herd, I'm usually in the artsy, fringy, PBS-y kind of shows that change maybe five people's lives forever while leaving everyone else wondering if they can still make the ticket lottery at 'Wicked.'

Not a lot of people know it, but I don't have any qualms about saying it - there's a lot of mental illness that runs in my family.

One of the most amazing things about 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is that every song is an original. There are no covers. I think 'Glee' had to deal with forcing covers into their plotlines. That can be difficult to pull off.

No matter who you are, and no matter what you've accomplished, I have yet to meet someone who doesn't still feel like they're banging their head against some wall over something in their way.

I am actually a soprano. No one knows this.

When Melissa McCarthy came out with 'Bridesmaids,' all of a sudden you saw a plus-sized woman who had three dimensions, was not an appendage, was pivotal to the plot.

I was a judge for the 2014 NYMF season. I've done it for a few years. They send you a certain amount of scripts and scores, and you rank them.

The people who succeed are those who are aware of the rules; they respect the rules. But they make up their own rules. They create for creative sake.