‘Purlie Victorious’
Kara Young
“My mime teacher had a double-jointed hand, and she taught me this skit about a dying butterfly in a forest. You find the dying butterfly, and you pick it up and your hand becomes the butterfly. And I performed this very often because I was the one who was able to do the double-jointed hand.”
‘Purlie Victorious’
Leslie Odom Jr.
“I played Martin Luther King in our Black history show in kindergarten. The pictures that I hold the dearest are of my grandmother and my father clapping in the front row. My dad looks like I just won the Nobel. He’s so proud that I’ve memorized my little four lines as Martin Luther King.”
‘An Enemy of the People’
Jeremy Strong
“One of the real formative experiences for me was seeing Ian Holm do ‘Lear’ at the National in the ’90s. He was a little man with tremendous, immense power and vulnerability. And I remember him on the heath at the end — he was naked in front of the well-heeled audience, and I remember being very affected by a human being willing to be that open and unprotected in front of people. It changed my life.”
‘mary jane’
Rachel McAdams
“I saw ‘Cats’ in Kitchener, Ontario. My dad was a mover, and he actually helped move the company, so we got free tickets. I was 8. I was walking on air when I came out of that show. I still remember looking down at my little white patent leather shoes and thinking my whole world has been cracked open.”
‘Merrily We Roll Along’
Daniel Radcliffe
“The first time I was onstage was in a school play called ‘Nellie the Elephant,’ when I was 5 or 6 — I was dressed as a monkey. But my first proper stage appearance was when I was about 13, in ‘The Play What I Wrote,’ that Kenneth Branagh directed, and they had a different celebrity in every night, and I did like three performances. As the guest, if you knew the lines, you could get laughs. So even knowing very little about comedy, I got laughs, and I remember feeling, ‘Oh, that’s incredible fun.’”
‘Merrily We Roll Along’
Jonathan Groff
“The first time I remember being onstage was playing Sandy, the dog, in a dance recital. I was 4 years old, and they were doing a number from ‘Annie,’ and I was in a dog head costume, and I remember hearing the audience laugh at me moving my head back and forth, and I was hooked.”
‘Merrily We Roll Along’
Lindsay Mendez
“The first show I saw on Broadway was at the Gershwin Theater. I saw ‘Show Boat.’ It was just so grand and incredible. I was, I think, 12 years old. I had loved theater as a little kid, but getting to see it at that level, it hit me for the first time that I could pursue it as an adult for a living.”
‘Appropriate’
Sarah Paulson
“Janet McTeer in ‘A Doll’s House’ — that was a very early, if not the first, Broadway show that my mother took me to see. I was in the first row of the mezzanine, and I’ll never forget the energy with which she came onstage. It was like watching a lightning bolt.”
‘Appropriate’
Corey Stoll
“Courtney B. Vance was playing Corey in the original ‘Fences,’ and I remember seeing that production with James Earl Jones, who was so obviously this powerhouse. But I remember seeing this young man going toe to toe with him, and holding his own against this colossus. It really blew me away that the theater was a place where there were all these different forms of power, and each person can hold an audience’s attention and affection.”
‘Stereophonic’
Will Brill, Eli Gelb, Juliana Canfield, Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka
“My parents took me to see ‘Peter Pan’ at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. I was 3, and I was sitting on my mom’s lap, and Captain Hook had Peter Pan tied up, and apparently I stood up on my mom’s lap, and I screamed, ‘You poo-poo head!’ at Captain Hook.” — Will Brill
“I saw Mark Rylance play Olivia in ‘Twelfth Night.’ And I was so astonished by his tragic sense of humor. I had been planning on doing an Olivia monologue to audition for school, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it because he’s too brilliant.’ I changed my monologue.” — Juliana Canfield
“I did three different productions of ‘Grease.’ I played Danny every time, at 12, 14, and then my senior year of high school. When I was Danny my senior year, all of a sudden the girls started to take notice.” — Tom Pecinka
‘Cabaret’
Eddie Redmayne
“The first show I ever saw was ‘Cats,’ when I was about 7 years old. I was up in the circle, and a cat crawled out of a hole somewhere and gave me the fright of my life. I found it utterly terrifying and completely exhilarating.”
‘Cabaret’
Gayle Rankin
“The thing that drew me to theater was, I was always fascinated by people. I was really quiet as a kid, and so people watching was like my TV. I remember sitting at a Starbucks in Glasgow when I was, like, 12, watching people for hours on end.”
‘Cabaret’
Bebe Neuwirth
“It wasn’t until I saw ‘Pippin,’ when I was 13, that I decided that I was going to be a dancer on Broadway and do that guy’s choreography. I didn’t know I was talking about god [Bob Fosse]. I didn’t know anything. It just resonated so deeply for me — I could feel that movement in my body, and I knew that I was watching an aspect of myself when I saw that.”
‘Cabaret’
Steven Skybell
“I did children’s theater in Lubbock, Tex. My first show was ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ I played [a] king — I was already character-typed as the older character even then. And from the time I was 10, I knew I wanted to be an actor. I’ve just slowly been pretending all along the way.”
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
Maleah Joi Moon, with Alicia Keys
“‘The Lion King’ was not only the first show that I saw — my parents took me when I couldn’t have been older than 6 — it was also my first Broadway callback. I auditioned for it when I was like 10. I loved it so much.” — Maleah Joi Moon
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
Kecia Lewis
“I wanted to be an actress probably the first time I saw Carol Burnett on TV as a child. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I was an only child so I did a lot of pretending in my living room.”
‘Hell’s Kitchen’
Shoshana Bean
“I remember seeing ‘Phantom of the Opera’ for the first time at around 11 or 12. I had heard the soundtrack before, so I knew all of the music, and I was ready to experience it. And I remember wanting to go back and be the only person in the theater, and I wanted to wear sweats and tuck my knees up under my chin and just devour it.”
‘Lempicka’
Amber Iman
“The first show that I have a memory of is ‘Once on This Island.’ My mom did it at the Alliance Theater when I was a kid, and that was the first time I was present enough to really understand what was happening. She was Mama Euralie. And then, when I was 8, I was Little Ti Moune at Clark Atlanta University, and having that memory of watching her, and then me being in it, is really beautiful.”
‘Lempicka’
Eden Espinosa
“‘Rent’ was the first musical cast album I heard where I was like, ‘These people are on Broadway?’ And then I had my first trip to New York, when I was a senior in high school, and we got scalper tickets to the show. All I wanted to do was be Maureen.”
‘Days of Wine and Roses’
Brian d’Arcy James
“The first show I did onstage was ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ at St. Stephen High School in Saginaw [in Michigan]. I played Randolph MacAfee, the kid in that song ‘Kids.’ What’s the matter with kids these days? I was the problem. The problem was me.”
‘Days of Wine and Roses’
Kelli O’Hara
“I have to say, I didn’t see theater very much — there was none to offer because I was in Western Oklahoma. The Red Carpet Community Theater did ‘Annie’ when I was a little kid, and I was very mad that I wasn’t in it. My sister was.”
‘Uncle Vanya’
William Jackson Harper
“My mom made me do theater classes because I was pretty shy. It was something I begrudgingly went into, and then I found improv and stuff like that — it wasn’t all just corny, getting on one knee wearing pumpkin pants and stuff like that. It was a lot more than that, and by senior year of high school it was my thing.”
‘doubt’
Liev Schreiber
“My mom used to take me to a lot of theater. We lived in the Lower East Side, and she took me to see this production of Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage and Her Children.’ I just thought it was so odd that people were wearing old-timey clothes and standing onstage. And then I saw a production of ‘Othello’ at the Delacorte in Central Park, and I think it was the moment after Raul Julia strangled Desdemona, this heron took off behind the stage. And it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really magical.’”
‘doubt’
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
“I didn’t know I wanted to be an actor until late in life. I was a big athlete in high school, and I had planned to go to law school. I got to college, I was playing club soccer, I was a public policy major, and I got hurt playing club soccer. And so I decided I would just audition for the play instead. It was an accident.”
‘doubt’
Amy Ryan
“I think I was in the sixth grade, and I saw ‘A Chorus Line.’ My family and I would go to the TKTS booth when we could, and that show floored me. I wasn’t a singer or a dancer, past what I did in my bedroom with my Broadway show record collection. Maybe the everyman journey of trying to get into a show spoke to the seedlings of a dream I was starting to have.”
‘The Outsiders’
Joshua Boone, Sky Lakota-Lynch and Brody Grant
“I moved around a lot as a kid, and wherever I moved, teachers would see something in me and would push me to do skits or plays.” — Joshua Boone
“I saw ‘A Chorus Line’ at Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. I was 13, and my sister got tickets for me for a Christmas gift. At first I was judging it, but I fell in love with it. I identified with the character who sang, ‘I can do that.’” — Sky Lakota-Lynch
“The first show I saw was Julie Taymor’s ‘Lion King.’ I was 5 years old. We traveled to visit my uncle in Chicago from my little small town — Rapid City, Mich. I see the show, and it felt so, so, so real that during the fight sequence in the end, with Simba and Scar, I screamed bloody murder throughout the whole theater. My nana picks me up, she lugs me over her shoulder, and she walks out. I didn’t see the end of the show until many years later.” — Brody Grant
‘MOTHEr play’
Jessica Lange
“I always had a great fantasy based on films. That’s really the only thing I was exposed to growing up. Seeing Kazan’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ with Vivien Leigh, or Merle Oberon in ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Those are the things that stuck out in my mind when I was young.”
‘MOTHEr play’
Jim Parsons
“I was very taken with everything Dustin Hoffman did when I was very young. ‘Tootsie’ is one of my favorite movies of all time. I was 10 years old when it came out, and I remember seeing it in the theater. I was older when I realized that what I connected to at that time was his playfulness.”
‘MOTHEr play’
Celia Keenan-Bolger
“My grandparents had a subscription to some theater in Detroit, and they wanted to take me to see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ on a Wednesday matinee and my third-grade teacher said I could go, but I had to come back and tell the class about the play. And I came back to the class and, apparently, was like, ‘So it starts in a forest …’ The play was something not of this world that I think was very arresting.”
‘Back to the Future’
Roger Bart
“My very first show was when I was in fifth grade, in an abridged version of ‘Oliver,’ in which I made a dazzling entrance, with a top hat and tails, through the cafeteria. I was [the Artful] Dodger. So my script was much smaller than Oliver’s, and it was devastating. And weirdly, it’s the role I’ve gotten all my career. It’s always the Dodger. It’s never Oliver.”
‘the notebook’
Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood
“In kindergarten I was in a Christmas pageant. The big girls were doing it, but we were the little ones. I had this nightgown that I can still picture — flannel, with stars on it — and the angels would come out and did sparkles in our hair, and I thought that was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me. We went back to the classrooms, and the sparkles kept falling out of our hair. ” — Maryann Plunkett
“‘West Side Story’ was one of my audition pieces: ‘Something’s Coming.’ That’s what got me my first job in New York, 52 years ago, on Broadway. I was auditioning for the Broadway musical ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona.’” — Dorian Harewood
‘patriots’
Michael Stuhlbarg
“The first thing that blew my mind was a production of ‘Fool for Love.’ I saw it at Steppenwolf Theater when I was 15. I was participating in a summer theater program at Northwestern University. It just knocked my socks off, and made me want to do this.”
‘Prayer for the French Republic’
Betsy Aidem
“My oldest childhood friend, Sharon, who died a couple of years ago, was in a production at the Jewish Community Center of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ She was playing Alice, and I was like, ‘I want to do that.’ I was probably 11. I don’t know if it was just being Alice going through the looking glass, or if it was just that she got to be in this make believe world.”
‘suffs’
Nikki M. James
“My first very serious fan experience was ‘Rent.’ I was 14, slept on the street — I was an actual Renthead. My parents would drive me in and then sit in the car across the street until the sun came up. I had made a community of friends, people I’m still dear friends with now.”
‘spamalot’
Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer
“They used to cover opening nights on television back when I was a kid. I remember seeing Faith Prince and Nathan Lane on television, talking backstage, and I was like, ‘Wow, I want to do that.’ And then she wound up playing my mom on Broadway many years later in ‘A Catered Affair.’”
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