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Thank you for all the joy you have brought to Broadway
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How does it feel to be here? It feels extraordinary. This has been, you know, for this particular show, a six-year journey to get it to the stage
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But it's been a 47-year or something like that relationship with this character, 37-year
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relationship with this character, to bring him to the point where I feel he's at his
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best, which is in front of a live audience. What is it like having the palm, all of the audience, the palm of your hand, and your
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entire cast when they sit in that theater and watch you do what you do
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I'm very blessed. We have an extraordinary cast. It's a great book
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It's a joy to play this guy. He's complicated. He's funny. He's charming
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He's irascible. He's frustrating. And he sings eight songs. So that was the task, is, all right, if I'm going to do this, I want to be as good as
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I can be. And so I've worked so hard and worked so hard every day to bring it every night because
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this is Broadway and people expect something special. And whatever I mean to people, I have to be even better than that
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So I feel that responsibility every time I go out there is to be as great as you can be
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And every night's a privilege to play this guy. What an incredible school
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I mean, Jason Robert Brown, Amanda Green. It was like collaborating with them, like old school, like throwing things at them
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they go back and write a song. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Look, you know, there was a couple of moments, I think we need a song here
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What about this? And then one time, you know, we were pretty much along and we had done a couple of workshops
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and stuff and I called Jason and go, where's my What Kind of Fool am I
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Where is that song? He needs that song. And then two days later, they write this incredible song called Any Man But Me, which is my 1045
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song and I got to kill it. And the responsibility of singing well was never lost on me
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I don't like to not be good or good enough. You just can't be good enough
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You got to be. So I loved our relationship with them. Jason is very much an amazing voice musically and understood the character
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They loved the film. They loved other things that they had seen that Don't Get Me Started and on HBO and other
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things about him. So they understood him and how to write him
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And we worked very closely together on I don't like this, I don't get this, I can't
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sing it this way. And the encouragement from them that I was credible was incredible for me once we started
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workshopping the show in front of audiences
