A biography for Brian Stokes Mitchellhasn’t been written yet.
“I gravitate to rhythmic music, so I listen to jazz, world music, Indian music, Hawaiian music, all kinds.”
“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.”
“I'm having a ball on 'Glee.' It's a joy to be working there - the whole cast is so talented.”
“Each time I have performed in Utah, I had a great time, and the audiences seem to enjoy what I do. The audiences are very warm and very appreciative.”
“When you're doing eight shows a week, you don't have much of a personal life.”
“Fear is destructive. Fear and creativity don't mix. Ultimately, it doesn't do you any good.”
“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.”
“I kind of feel the career chose me. My motto has always been, 'Go where I'm wanted.'”
“On Broadway, you are working with some incredible people, and they have great reasons for doing things the way they do.”
“If anything, when I was young, I wanted to be an orchestra.”
“I was raised on jazz. My father, from the time I was born, used to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and put on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane - all these great, classic albums.”
“I love being outside, and I love the fresh air.”
“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.”
“I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.”
“Astaire was ballroom, basically, and Gene Kelly had such athleticism - that's always what I responded to and what just blew my head open when I watched Gene Kelly's numbers. But, Fred Astaire was just so incredibly inventive and so, so smooth - so smooth.”
“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'd always been a huge fan of Stephen Schwartz.”
“What I love about piano and vocal is it's incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you're not distracted by an orchestra. When it's just a piano and a voice, it's about the purity of singing the song.”
“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.'”