Structured Performance Quotes

I feel lucky to receive such critical attention and praise when you're in a show that's going to last a month, it's just easier when audiences are more receptive. I've done two new shows this year, so I'm always excited to work on something a little older, traditional and structured.

Improv is not something I had a lot of experience with, because for a long time, my only experience in front of a camera was all television, which is pretty rigid script-wise, except for the occasional scene where you toss in an ad-lib just to elongate something. Like, say, you're walking down a hall and you just don't have enough dialogue, and you throw in something. But you don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed.

Whatever is on the page is what I'm married to. I'm very prepared. I'm a thespian. I don't like to improv. I don't like to go off course 'cause I think that's where stuff happens. When you stick to the material 'cause it's written so well, that's where the magic happens.

Mitch Miller knew exactly what he wanted me to sing. He didn't want me to improvise at all.

We've always had the sensibility that you work on the set, and you structure it, much like a play, where once you've got the lines down and blocking right, you freeze it, and then you go out and do what you're doing night after night. You want to structure something that has form and that builds the right dynamic from start to finish.

Theatre is different. We can spend two weeks around a table talking about subtext. In opera, there is a score, and people already know their parts. And they move differently. I find all this liberating.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.

He was very much concerned with logic and function, he always worked his solos out before playing them.