Donna Lynne Champlin

If I could say anything to anybody out there thinking of creating their own content is to always, always, come from a place of authenticity.

About six months after I moved to New York City, I was literally down to my last twenty dollars when a friend of mine from college got me a job at an Upper East side gym. I ran the cafe, and I was the janitor. It was an unfortunate combination of duties, to say the least.

A musical, in its true form, is where emotions reach a height where true spoken word cannot be enough, and you must sing. That's all it is. It's not posh; it's not out of your reach. It's the most visceral way to tell a story.

Not a lot of people know it, but I don't have any qualms about saying it - there's a lot of mental illness that runs in my family.

As a gold-card-carrying member of the nerd herd, I'm usually in the artsy, fringy, PBS-y kind of shows that change maybe five people's lives forever while leaving everyone else wondering if they can still make the ticket lottery at 'Wicked.'

The people who succeed are those who are aware of the rules; they respect the rules. But they make up their own rules. They create for creative sake.

The schedule on TV is crazy. You could not work for two days but then work from 4 A.M. to 1 A.M. the next day. I definitely wanted more family time.

Acting I never worried about, but it's so strange that on-camera work is so much more technical than theatre work, which I would have never thought in a million years.

I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.

If you miss something in the theater, you are working through it; you'll get it tomorrow. It's easy to forgive yourself in the theater. On television, you do one shot. All you've done rehearsal-wise is be blocked. There is all this pressure to get it right then.