I love the theater, and I just don't love television like that.

When I was 6 years old, I asked my parents for an organ. I don't have any idea why I wanted an organ.

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.

For a while, I couldn't get arrested in television because everybody thought of me as that guy on 'Trapper John.' So I thought, 'Great, I'll come out here to New York and do some theater, and when they get tired of me, I'll do something else.'

I think I just had it by osmosis: an appreciation of Duke Ellington before I really even knew who he was.

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.

Music is liquid. It's meant to be messed with and played with and stretched and pulled and pushed, I think.

I'd been playing the piano since I was 6 and wanted to be a composer, but I also wanted to be an actor. I decided to just pursue both and see which won out.

To me, a theater is a kind of a sacred space. It needs a kind of ceremony, like what happens when you consecrate a church.