I didn't see any Broadway till I was in my late twenties.
My favorite thing as a performing artist is to get a pile of raw material from a writer who says, 'Will you help me make this real?' There's nothing like starting from scratch.
I don't really talk about 'Next to Normal' that much anymore.
Tom Kitt aside - he's in his own category with me, of course - Stephen Sondheim is one of my all-time favorite composers.
If there were a song from 'West Side Story' that I would do, it would be 'Something's Coming,' but in a sense that put it in the right key for me and then do that one.
I think I enjoy Sondheim so much because of the lyrics. The lyrics, the cornucopia of options.
When the decades pass and you're working in this business, the audiences get older with you. That's the nice part about it. They're so supportive and so loving.
I've always been drawn to raw material.
I did grow up in a small town. I grew up in a lot of different places. But I consider my home to be Cleveland.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.
I wasn't a musical-theater kid. We went to plays at school and took field trips to see Shakespeare. And that really sparked that fire for me, and so that's still going, and I haven't given up on it.
I would love to play Mary in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'Virginia Woolf' or a comedy - just, like, a slapstick comedy.
What made me so brave? Maybe it was being the middle kid of 11, and we all had to share one bathroom. New underwear? I never discovered that until I got into college.
I was 14. I went to see a production of 'Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,' and when they got to that final song, 'If We Only Have Love,' it was like the top of my head had blown off.
I love every minute of my work.
I had to go off by myself to try and discover what my talent really was.
Part of the frustration of being bipolar is people don't understand what it feels like.
It's nice to be in a smaller room. I like the big arenas as well, but at my core, I'm a live performer, so it's nice to be able to feel the warmth of everybody in the room.
I've been committed to personal growth since I was a teenager, and I'm a believer in the idea that your thought is the only thing that matters.
'American Psycho' reminds me of my track in 'Tommy,' my first Broadway show. It's similar conceptually and has that rock n' roll streak.
