I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing 'Maria' from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.
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 the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
I was a little boy who watched 'Solid Gold' every week and wanted to be a 'Solid Gold' dancer. And I would do very in-depth reenactments of 'Grease 2' and 'West Side Story' with my sister Natalie in our garage. I was a very theatrical kid.
'West Side Story' I used to watch all the time - I don't know why. Well, I do - it's a great movie. I love the music in it. I love the actors.
If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
In my youth, cinemas showed two films in one day. I used to watch both of them. It may sound strange, but 'West Side Story' was the only musical I liked. I didn't like musicals, or films with songs, at all. I always thought they were not real, that the songs sounded a little bit false. But in the case of 'West Side Story,' things were different.
The wonderful drama teacher at my high school, Barbara Patterson, saw me standing in the hall and told me I should audition for 'West Side Story.' I guess she thought I looked like a gang member.
It sounds corny to say, but we're like a family. That experience for all of us really created a bond... The 'West Side Story' experience, it really is a family. There's a closeness that has continued.
I don't regret 'West Side Story' one bit. It was an incredible movie full of young people with amazing rapport.
