Do you know I used to pride myself on the fact that I'd never booked a show in my life, but that I'd played so many because I'd been invited?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I always, always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that, when I got a mini-series, I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob.
Every show I play, whether it's for an audience of 15,000 or 50, I look at it as a party, and I'm the host.
I don't go to a lot of shows. If you go to too many shows, then it doesn't become a special thing. Whenever I've been to a concert, it has been such a cool experience.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
I was never taken to a play or concert or church. Yet I was a show-off, a dreamer, a storyteller.
On every show that I have been on, I have played myself.
I pride myself in the fact that in the six months tour of Cinderella, I didn't take one show off.
I'm in this really cool place in my career, where the stage I'm on that night, whether it's the Paisley tour, the CMT tour, or a bar with 10 people in it, it is the most important show I've ever played in my life. I go to the ends of my imagination to do something that's unforgettable every night.
People say, 'What are your hobbies?' I say, 'I've been doing shows ever since I was a kid.' When I left college, all I wanted to be was a musical theater chick. I auditioned tons. It just didn't pan out.
I play every show like it's my last. Fortunately, that's never turned out to be the case.