If you look at the timing of many of the Greek dramas from the theatrical point of view, it's all off, and I think the reason for that is that music played a very important part.
Sometimes there's no qualitative difference between two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half hour shows. It's just a matter of how long you do it. It's not like the show must be three hours and 30 minutes to work. That's just not the case.
Vegas has the Whitman's Sampler of audiences. They come from all different places, so you have to do some crowd psychology. You have to find the heartbeat of the room. It doesn't shift my jokes, but it shifts my timing and my attention.
I don't believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more.
In a play, you dictate pace, you dictate rhythm, you dictate when people look at you, when people should be looking at something else. In film, the editor does that.
The good thing about Broadway is that you don't have to worry about an airdate. It gets done when it gets done.
Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience.
There was a three hour differential in performances because the sponsor insisted it be done live for California. You would go on at 8 pm in New York but you would also have to go on at 8 p.m. in California. That meant coming back in to do the show at 11 p.m.
You don't want to hit your peak until late in the season.
In general, I don't really think too much about pacing, myself. You kind of look at each script and what each script demands.
I tend to stay up very late at night, so I wake up later in the day. This allows me to be in the middle of my workday when I am onstage at night.
I always say it takes three weeks to know a character and three months to own it. And I think that's probably true of every theater artist. If you really want to see a performance of the show, wait three months.
When it comes to being under the ring, I'd either go under before the doors opened or would get snuck under in the dark while a video package played on the screen. There were times when I was underneath for six-plus hours because it wouldn't work out to sneak me under later in the show.
We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.
Early in my career, I wasn't good in the strike zone early. I was good in the strike zone late, which is not a good thing.
The terrible thing about acting in the theater is that you have to do it at night.
If you go on stage with the wrong attitude, or something in your performance is off, you can lose an audience in the first minute. That first minute is crucial.
In the theater, it's about taking time in a musical segment, a pause in a musical way and then moving on.
