The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The audience, the place you're in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.
You perform for a different audience each night. People who don't understand just think that you go out there every night and do the same thing, but you don't - you have to find out who they are and give it to them.
I understand it's difficult but you've got to think about yourself, you know, and not just follow the crowd.
And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.
What I've learned by going out and playing smaller venues and being more in touch with people is getting feedback, just by virtue of being able to watch the crowd react and watch their faces instead of being blinded by 3,000 spotlights. I've realized that you can quickly get out of touch with your audience if you're not careful.
The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If you're not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, you're kind of stuck.
When you put the musical in front of an audience, you get to see how the audience reacts.
The thing I fail to do is fully comprehend what's given back to me by the audience. You would think you would be a performer partly so you could feel all the appreciation or adulation, but I haven't quite managed that yet.
You're playing for yourself. And if you're not playing for yourself, you're an entertainer, doing it for the crowd.
The only thing you can do to lead a crowd is prove your passion to them.