After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.
Larry Hagman and I are very old friends.
I was totally delighted, interested in, and amused by my stint on 'Voyager.'
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 did a benefit one night at Carnegie Hall with Bono and Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright.
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.
I am concerned about the musical theater, selfishly, because I love it.
My dad would take me downtown, and I'd stand backstage and watch him in the vaudeville pit band. I was 6 or 7. He was a musician, a band leader, a wonderful clarinetist and saxophone player.
I've always wanted to do, oddly enough, a live variety show, but only with a live audience.
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.
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.
It can take me forever to choose the right coffee cup in the morning. And it does make a difference!
Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.
I don't like to bad-mouth other shows, but I was very disturbed after seeing 'Starlight Express.' It had very little to do with musical comedy as I know it. It had to do with sound and spectacle and records and technology and amplification.
I'm always interested in the challenge of doing something new.
You can be taking two steps forward as an actor, but if a movie doesn't make money, you might as well be taking two steps backwards. It's all about economics.
Theater is the most important thing in life for me.
My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.
When I was eight, I went to the theatre, and I remember looking at the stage afterward and pointing and saying, 'I want to do that.' I don't think that's ever changed.
There's a lot going on in the world that's very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we're dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.
