Author

If you're an open channel when you're onstage, if you're just a vessel, things are going to come out that are stored away deep in your DNA.

At 14, 15 years old, I started reading 'Backstage' regularly. Eventually, I got enough courage to look at the auditions section.

Making $1,260 a week at 17 years old? That was a million dollars a week to me!

It's about polarization. You're trying to stir up something in your audience.

I was a good student; I was a good boy. I got A's, and I did all the papers right.

I think I spent most of my childhood, and my early years as a performer, in student mode. And I think that's OK - I mean, it led me to where I am.

I have a great foundation, a great training foundation. But it took me a long time to let the training go.

I know what it's like to be ignored; when I got to L.A., I longed for somebody who looked like me to show me the ropes.

That was the bat signal for me - 'Rent' changed my life. It took me years before I got beyond that show.

I don't have any control over the offers that are going to come to me or not come to me. But I can't go backward, and so that's what's tricky.

Leslie Odom, Jr.