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.
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.
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 am actually a soprano. No one knows this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Support women directors. When a play opens, and it's by a woman, put your money down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's so much worse to live in regret in your forties than it is to take a chance in your late twenties.
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.
