If you don't get a laugh I immediately think it's somebody else's fault. You can always blame the material. But when it's just yourself and songs that you've picked up because you love them and stories that you've written yourself and patter you think is really funny if that tanks, there's no one to blame it on. God knows, I try!

But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.

Yeah, the actors really come in as lumps of clay. We're ready to work with the directors and find our way. These guys really come in having done their work.

My whole family is in the arts some way or the other. My father was a cellist in a symphony outside Chicago that was a side-job, he was a scientist. My mother was a dancer in New York. She was next-door neighbors with Dorothy Loudon and they moved to New York together. Mom was a dancer in New York for several years before she got married. My sister was a classical pianist. And my brother was a partier. So it all just seemed to work.

I come in as an actor, having read through the script a few times, made a couple of character-choices, thinking I'm going to be working on it during rehearsals. It's very different. It takes a while we're always like dogs sniffing each other's asses.

I know when I like to go see a show, I like to see people show as many different facets of themselves as they can, because I think that's the fun of it.

That's opera! I just love it. It just thrills me! And it's very different than theatre, and sometimes it can be frustrating because when you come in the first day of rehearsals obviously you're an opera fan, right?