“Jazz is musical humor. The noun jazz describes a modern American technique for the playing of any music, accompanied by noise called harmony, and interpolated instrumental effects.”

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh.

Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.

It also describes music exhibiting influence of that technique which has as its traditional object to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor.

Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It’s recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race’s sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

I wore goofy hats to school and did musical theater.

I’ve always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that’s where I got most of my training.

We shot ‘High School Musical’ in eight weeks. I spent longer rehearsing for ‘Hairspray’ than filming ‘High School Musical’.

If you’d have asked me when I was auditioning for High School Musical if I ever thought I was going to play a Marine.

In my own musical existence I don’t feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician.

If you write enough musicals you pretty much have a sense of where they should go.

Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to really land musically dramatic work.

Whether it’s animated, whether it’s live-action, whether it’s Broadway, whether it’s television, a musical is a musical is a musical.