Michael Arden

It was pretty cool.

And I got, you know, and I got a couple of suits out of it.

Performing inside a production centered around an artist with that kind of history and precision must have created its own education for you.

Absolutely.

I mean, I got a front row seat to the best master class anyone could imagine watching her perform.

And work in audience, watching her sing these incredible songs every night and navigate how to perform them for people who didn't necessarily speak the language she was doing it in.

I mean, it was really cool.

Looking back on it, like, I can't believe I got to do that.

I can't either.

It was really, really cool.

Yeah, I am, to say an avid fan, a zealot fan, would be an understatement.

I've been a fan of hers since I was seven or eight years old, listening to my grandmother's LP of Stoney End, and then sang that song over and over and over again in front of my grandmother's full-length mirror in her bedroom with a hairbrush as a microphone.

Well, there you go.

And I can still sing that song.

That's one of my favorite songs of all time.

Well, it was funny, too, because I somehow had like never seen Funny Girl.

I liked musicals, but I was sort of like into, you know, the new stuff.

And like somehow like she had eluded me a little bit.

I knew who she was.

I knew she was famous.