Madelaine Petsch Quotes

When I saw 'Chess' in London, I thought it was horrible. It was so static. People were coming down front and just facing the audience, singing.

'Cabaret' was one of the first pieces of musical theater I saw that showed the possibilities of what musical theater can do.

Doing a musical is not just acting. It's total theater. When you have to justify the enormous projection of energy it takes to just go into song and dance, you realized why it's such a humbling experience every time you go into a show.

I did my first show when I was five and I was the King of the Oompa Loompas in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' The kids' theater company, I was the youngest one, so there wasn't a part for me, so they made me the king of the Oompa Loompas.

I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do 'Jesus Christ Super Star' in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.

I think that of musicals - especially the big, splashy ones - require an actor that's also part cheerleader, too, and that's really tough to do if it's not something that really grabs you and your heart's not in it.

I did the 'Wizard of Oz' in third grade, and I was a witch.

I was Aladdin, and then I was Captain Von Trapp from 'Sound Of Music' when I was 7 or 8, and then King Arthur. I was always the lead. I've always enjoyed being onstage, acting obnoxious, being someone that wasn't me, hiding behind a character.

I saw 'Cats' on a school trip. I thought it was neat and a little weird. The set was cool.

In theater, you're playing characters. You believe you're somebody else, and you're acting.

Playing Fagin in the play and film was a small miracle.

Musical theater is great; you get painted up, you get to play princesses and witches, and you sing. The joy alone of that can really carry a lot.

In 'Seesaw,' I played Gittel Mosca, and because it was a musical, I loved it more because I was able to do anything. I was able to use all parts of me that I don't get to use... the comedy and the singing and the dancing.

I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

I think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives.

I've been on stage plenty of times, and one of the things about being a stage actress is you have a 3-month run to revisit the story nightly and play it again.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.

'Sleepy Hollow' was really the first thing I'd done that gave me the opportunity in the modern age to build an authentic relationship with an audience that was a lot more like what happens in theater.

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.'

In Broadway, we do love jazz hands.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

Once I decided to be a different person on stage, I got the chance to be larger than life and over the top, which I love.