What usually happens on the Oscar telecast is that as soon as best picture is announced, everyone is up out of their seats and running off to their parties.
People think, 'Oh, you're doing 'The Wiz' because 'Empire' is such a big hit.' The truth is, staging this musical has been a dream of ours since the '90s, but the rights were tied up. It's just coincidental that, this year, when we were choosing a new musical, the rights were cleared.
Carrie Underwood clearly drove 'The Sound of Music.' For 'Peter Pan,' we had terrific actors but not stars, and we did not do nearly as well.
We'd never do 'The Sound of Music' because the movie was perfect.
We're finding that the casting of 'A Few Good Men' is different from the musicals because the kind of actors that you need to do it are movie actors, basically.
I think we sublimated our Broadway desires by doing theater in Hollywood - not on stage but by doing the movies of 'Chicago' and 'Hairspray' and also musicals on TV. We did Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella' and 'Gypsy' and 'Annie.' Even 'Smash' was like doing theater.
