A lot of people have problems thinking of you doing more than one thing. If you do one thing, then you couldn't possibly do another thing well. Of course, we know that's not so.
— Joel Grey
I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.
I'm very slow. I'm a slow learner.
Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.
Whenever I get to work with great actors, I'm happy.
I saw Lee J. Cobb in 'Death of a Salesman' when I was about 15, and I couldn't get up from my seat in the theater; I was so... I was weeping, and I was upset. And I find that people are still like that in a similar circumstance in a theater today, where they just can't get up. It's too heartbreaking.
I'm essentially an actor. And the fact that I got away with singing and dancing for a long time is still a miracle to me.
My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.
I don't look like Brad Pitt.
You are either visual or you're not.
I love 'Cabaret' and 'George M!' They're both incredible as far as I'm concerned.
The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I've always been hooked on its sounds, although I don't speak it.
When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.
I never thought I would sing or dance - ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I'd be a character actor.
The subject matter of the show, 'Cabaret,' was more than risky. And the emcee I would be playing didn't have a single line of dialogue. Still, it was full of possibilities, and it was mine.
The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.
I never think about my age very much. I've always lived my life the same way, full of excitement and anticipation of wonderful things and the knowledge that some not-so-wonderful things come with it.
I'm crazy about surprises. I love chance.
I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.
For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: 'Chicago,' 'Wicked' and 'Anything Goes.'
My dad was a really funny, really talented guy who had a great success in a limited audience. But from him, I learned that he always felt the audience was entitled to 150 per cent. If he was performing at an event, he'd keep playing until the last person had finished dancing.
I did a benefit one night at Carnegie Hall with Bono and Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright.
Acting always affects every part of your life because it's such a solitary, lonely, and thrilling circumstance that you're taking on someone else's character and that responsibility. It's exhausting.
I was accepted to UCLA, but at the same time, I had a job offer at Chicago's Chez Paree nightclub. My father, being a practical man, felt I should take the job.
My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I'm sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.
There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.
I don't want to do material that I don't like. I've always stuck to that policy. If that means being out of work for awhile, that's fine with me.
There is nothing I enjoy more than doing my show.
I'd like to direct something at the Public.
I used to eat Danny Kaye's food. I had his Chinese and Italian meals, and that was as good as it gets.
I was so successful in Cleveland, and we moved to Los Angeles, and there was nothing for me to do. All of a sudden, from being a success, I was a has-been at 13.
I wasn't sure what it would take to make it in the theater, but despite the struggle, that was all I ever really wanted.
If you don't tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.
When I met Jo Wilder, I fell crazy in love and never thought about homosexuality. And I thought, 'Well, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is life.'
I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.
I worked with a lot of leading ladies: Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Rankin, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. They're all phenomenal talents.
I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.
Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.
That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.
When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that's all acting is, is storytelling.
I was small growing up, and to make matters worse, I wore glasses, and my mother dressed me in attention-getting outfits. I was a target of bullies.
I thought 'The Humans' was a beautiful play.
I'm about possibilities and about surprises and the life force.
I really do enjoy everything I do. I just do so much.
My father was Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones and then went on to improvise some successful Yiddish parodies, some of which I perform. My favorite was 'Geshray of the Vilde Kotchke,' his version of 'Cry of the Wild Goose.'
I'm enormously sympathetic to talented people who have few roles to choose from.
Often, entertainment goes deeper, in terms of ideas, than the newspapers.
I was already in my early twenties, but I looked much younger because I was fresh-faced and, well, short. So I did songs such as 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah' and jokes such as describing current events as 'ancient history.' Boy, did the audience roar at that one.
There's a civility that has always been a part of me.
The theater is the place where people create ideas and send messages out, and you learn, and I think it's a fair venue for disagreement and enlightenment.
