There's pre-production, and the second part is when you start rehearsal. Pre-production was a very large learning curve for me.
— Donna Lynne Champlin
My brother Mike is the hardest working person I know.
As an actor, you do feel very powerless... you are at the whim of the agent who submits you for a project, and then at the audition, you are at the whim of the casting director who will cast you or not.
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.
The schedule on TV is crazy. You could not work for two days but then work from 4 A.M. to 1 A.M. the next day. I definitely wanted more family time.
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.
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.
I think with 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel has really blown up the whole casting idea. It's miraculous. You look at '1776,' it's a bunch of old white guys and old white chicks. You look at 'Hamilton,' and it's just the faces of America.
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 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.
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.
It seems the more I play Jane Austen, the more poetic my writing becomes. The other day, I left a Post-it note for my husband that had the word 'ergo' on it. I gotta rein it in before I get all full out Madonnannoying.
Support women directors. When a play opens, and it's by a woman, put your money down.
It's very rare for me to come across a script for NYMF that is truly its own animal. That's really what appealed to me about 'Valueville.' I still have my notes from when I first read it.
Since I play piano, I can play the right hand on the accordion, no problemo. It's the left hand with the buttons that makes me crazy.
When you are in the musical theater and you are someone who looks like me, you are constantly bending yourself, bending your voice to fit the job they've given you.
What I miss about the theater is the live experience.
I am actually a soprano. No one knows this.
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.
I've had a lot of therapy in my life.
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.
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.
I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.
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.
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.'
I would absolutely love to do a revival of 'Bury the Dead' by Irwin Shaw on Broadway, but it would have to be Joe Calarco's version that we did Off-Broadway at The Transport Group in 2008. It was just one of those amazing shows that didn't run long enough and not nearly enough people got a chance to see.
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.
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.
To this day, I am so grateful I grew up in Rochester, New York.
The toughest thing for me is doing on-camera stuff as a comedian.
Phyllida Lloyd is probably the sweetest person on the planet.
'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.
I've become accustomed to not being cast for television and film because of how I look.
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.
It's so much worse to live in regret in your forties than it is to take a chance in your late twenties.
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.
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.
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.
If you miss something in the theater, you are working through it; you'll get it tomorrow. It's easy to forgive yourself in the theater. On television, you do one shot. All you've done rehearsal-wise is be blocked. There is all this pressure to get it right then.
