For me, in my auditioning career and my professional life, since I am kind of a big person and since I have a big personality, I often find myself trying to squeeze myself into boxes that are really too small for me, and it ends up not working out.
— Barrett Wilbert Weed
A lot of the times, what girls go through when they're growing up gets minimized. 'Mean Girls' marked the first time I saw teenage female aggression articulated well and with importance.
I teach voice, and I teach pretty much just, like, whatever people need. So if they want me to work on a monologue with them, or if they want me to do some work with them, I do that. And then I do master classes, like at high schools - which is my most favorite thing to do.
One of the things I love about stage makeup is I get to play up my eyes even more than usual.
The goal, when you're playing a character that's super beloved from a movie, is to honor what the actor before you has done and then really just expand, which is what you get to do in a musical because you have songs, choreography, and everything is happening in real time.
I wound up going to the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, which was a really life-changing experience that's still the most intense working environment I've ever been part of. Even now, as a professional actor, I've never once been held to the standards I was held to at my high school.
I started performing with the Boston Children's Opera when I was 5, and I stayed working with that group until I was about 12 or 13, so that was a huge part of my life. It was, weirdly, an extremely professional environment geared towards kids.
I think, when you're an actor, it kind of enables you to fully inhabit all of the youngest parts of yourself.
I think it's important to be friends with the person you have to kiss onstage in front of a hundred people. You might not be friends in real life - especially if you're in high school - but you need to at least be 'secret friends' for it to work. Try to be comfortable with each other.
I'm not able to change the tools that I bring to the table. I've tried to fade into the background many times, and I just can't do it.
High school is something that we have to deal with. It's not a glorified fluffy, fun, prince-and-princess kind of time.
When 'Mean Girls' came out, I was 15. So I saw that movie and was like, 'That is so funny.' But it still has that fluffy, happy ending, and that doesn't happen in high school.
One of the things that I love so much about the character of Sally Bowles is that she is such a huge character - she is so roomy.
I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I want to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think, also, because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the men who do musical theater differently than we treat the women in musical theater.
Whenever I'm teaching teenagers, I always try to treat them, like, a little bit more gently but the same that I treat adults.
When you become a professional, there is all this other stuff you have to do. That part is the job, capital J-O-B. They're very different things, but they're all part of the same career. Once you get onstage and you get to perform, that's your reward for doing your job.
You have to learn how to dress yourself and how to walk into a room and talk to people. Once you're in rehearsal, you have to know how to rehearse and how to communicate with your creatives, even if you don't communicate the same way.
It's important to be really verbal about what you believe, to try to claim America as your own, as we're trying to figure out the identity of this country and what we're going to be.
As an adult, you want to connect with people, and you want to feel accepted.
I remember, when I saw the movie of 'Cabaret,' I was amazed by Liza Minnelli: like, 'Wow, that kind of looks like someone I could be similar to.'
My senior year, I got to play Maureen in 'Rent,' and I had more fun than I'd ever had in my life.
Tina Fey is a genius - I've seen it with my own eyes now. She's a very observant person, and I've never seen somebody write such a high volume or as quickly as she does.
All you can really do is try to be a good person and try to make good decisions and try to survive.
When I heard that they were making 'Mean Girls' into a musical, I immediately said, 'That's my part. I want to play Janis so badly.' And I wanted to hang out with Tina Fey! What's cooler than that?
I got serious about performing, and I got serious about acting. It's very funny; singing has always been a very separate thing for me - until I went to college. I just studied musical theater because I was like, 'That means I can study voice and acting in the same major, and I won't have to double major.' Now I do musicals for a living.
My insane mascara layering is my private homage to Winona Ryder's amazing peepers.
When I was in high school, I was so in love - as I should have been - with the performance aspect of theater and just the literal act of performing.
I wind up playing these characters a lot: They have self-esteem issues, or they're going through a lot as a young adult.
The point of songs in theater is that you're supposed to end up in a different place than where you started.
My father passed away when I was pretty young. I was 7 years old, and I think when that happens, there are a variety of ways that a young person can react to that loss. I think, for me, it kind of put me in a perpetual state of feeling like something is wrong with me and like I didn't belong, or everybody else had things that I didn't have.
There are good musicals that came from movies, like 'Shrek' and 'Legally Blonde!' But, um... they should never mess with 'The Hunger Games.'
My high school was the closest thing to hell on earth that exists. I was around a lot of ultra-preppy, very mean-spirited girls, and they were very cruel to me. I ended up switching schools and going to this performing arts school near Boston called Walnut Hill.
I think it's really important for young audiences to see that you don't have to apologize for being angry when you're angry, and you don't have to apologize for standing up for yourself when people are pushing you around.
We have to train our kids better and really enforce in them that no matter what mainstream media and pop culture and all of the terrible things around us say - that it's OK to tear people down, that somehow it will make you feel better, and it's OK to gossip about people - it won't make you feel better.
