Brian Stokes Mitchell Quotes
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I think I just had it by osmosis: an appreciation of Duke Ellington before I really even knew who he was.
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When I was preparing 'Kiss Me, Kate,' I did go to the Museum of Broadcasting and watched an old kinescope of Alfred Drake doing the role on a television special. It was interesting, but I didn't feel any need to try to copy him.
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I gravitate to rhythmic music, so I listen to jazz, world music, Indian music, Hawaiian music, all kinds.
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I like to sing the songs people love, like 'Impossible Dream.'
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Something is guiding my career; I don't know what it is. When I look back at my career, I call myself the most lucky actor in the world. It is all I have ever done. I do master classes, and I tell people not to use me as an example. I do not know anyone like me - not to brag - it is just very unusual.
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Performing in the theater is a very ethereal profession because you do it once and it goes out into the ether and it goes into people's minds and that's the only place that it ever exists. And it never exists truly; it only exists in the way that people think they remember it. But it's a really powerful way to tell a story and to pass something on.
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My job as an entertainer is to give a great show.
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I always like to talk about how important space is. Art is in the spaces. Anybody can sing a note; it takes an artist to sing the spaces. Anybody can paint a brushstroke; it takes an artist to know when not to put the brushstroke.
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I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.
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The first role that I played as a musical - I was 14 years old, and I played Birdie in 'Bye Bye Birdie.' That was an awakening of, 'Wow, I'm good at that. People are responding.' And I hardly knew what I was doing back then, but there was something that people were seeing.
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People in the performing arts have a lot of other skills they don't realize they can utilize, and part of what the Actors Fund program is there to do is wake their head up to realize there are other things they can do.
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I think the problem is when people hear 'arts education,' they think, 'I don't want my son to be some painter that's going to be hanging in some museum after he dies. I don't want my daughter to be a struggling artist making no money.' People don't realize it's more than that. It's beautiful. It brings beauty to our lives.
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When you have a community that's strong in the arts, it brings all sorts of attention and different businesses into the community.
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I can't remember ever not singing.
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Left to my own devices, I would go to bed at 2:30 or 3, but I can't do that if I'm getting up at 6:50!
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My favorite music is jazz, actually. It's what I listen to, it's what I was raised on, and it's what I prefer to sing.
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I've always felt that my career was in wiser hands than mine. Whatever, in its good time, is supposed to happen will happen.
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People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply strictly with musical theater phrasing. Musical theater tends to be very one and three, and jazz is definitely two and four.
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What I love about piano and vocal is it's incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you're not distracted by an orchestra. When it's just a piano and a voice, it's about the purity of singing the song.
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I'm not a pop singer; I'm not a jazz singer. And I know I sing like not a whole lot of people do; I also know that a lot of other people act like I do. And better than I do. But what informs the singing is the acting. They're not separate from each other.
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I studied film scoring and orchestration and conducting and arranging in my twenties, and I scored a lot of television shows and other things.
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Artists make our lives livable and enjoyable.
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Astaire was ballroom, basically, and Gene Kelly had such athleticism - that's always what I responded to and what just blew my head open when I watched Gene Kelly's numbers. But, Fred Astaire was just so incredibly inventive and so, so smooth - so smooth.
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I always call myself the luckiest actor in the world because I made a living solely as a performer from the time I left home at 17 years old.