Barrett Wilbert Weed

A lot of the times, what girls go through when they're growing up gets minimized. 'Mean Girls' marked the first time I saw teenage female aggression articulated well and with importance.

When you become a professional, there is all this other stuff you have to do. That part is the job, capital J-O-B. They're very different things, but they're all part of the same career. Once you get onstage and you get to perform, that's your reward for doing your job.

For me, in my auditioning career and my professional life, since I am kind of a big person and since I have a big personality, I often find myself trying to squeeze myself into boxes that are really too small for me, and it ends up not working out.

The goal, when you're playing a character that's super beloved from a movie, is to honor what the actor before you has done and then really just expand, which is what you get to do in a musical because you have songs, choreography, and everything is happening in real time.

My high school was the closest thing to hell on earth that exists. I was around a lot of ultra-preppy, very mean-spirited girls, and they were very cruel to me. I ended up switching schools and going to this performing arts school near Boston called Walnut Hill.

We have to train our kids better and really enforce in them that no matter what mainstream media and pop culture and all of the terrible things around us say - that it's OK to tear people down, that somehow it will make you feel better, and it's OK to gossip about people - it won't make you feel better.

The point of songs in theater is that you're supposed to end up in a different place than where you started.

I remember, when I saw the movie of 'Cabaret,' I was amazed by Liza Minnelli: like, 'Wow, that kind of looks like someone I could be similar to.'

I think it's really important for young audiences to see that you don't have to apologize for being angry when you're angry, and you don't have to apologize for standing up for yourself when people are pushing you around.

When I was in high school, I was so in love - as I should have been - with the performance aspect of theater and just the literal act of performing.

I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I want to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think, also, because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the men who do musical theater differently than we treat the women in musical theater.

One of the things that I love so much about the character of Sally Bowles is that she is such a huge character - she is so roomy.