Theatre Quotes - Page 22

Theatre has so many competitors, it's no longer enough to see and hear a play. You want to be able to touch and smell it, too.

I think there's that weird bastardization where musical theatre actors are treated as almost like vaudevillians or circus performers - that we're somehow not good actors because we sing and dance.

I went to the University/Resident Theatre Association auditions. Deans come and watch you in this theater. You have three minutes, and you have to do two contrasting monologues - at that time, this is 2003 - one classical and one contemporary.

Theatre is alive and it is now, and then it's gone.

I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.

There's nowhere to hide in the theatre. You can't be the one in rehearsal who doesn't know their lines.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.

I did my New York debut at 21. It was “On the Town” at the George Gershwin Theatre. New York is my artistic home.

I am a Broadway theatre guy... so it was kind of my goal this year to come out to LA for pilot season and expand my horizons

In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

I wanted to be a therapist if the acting didn't work. I also did a lot waitressing and odd jobs. I'd audition but couldn't get hired to save my life. I'd do Off-Broadway theatre and that was great and I was excited and thrilled, feeling like, 'Well, it's Off-Broadway, but there's still the Broadway in there.'

If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them.

You must not think of yourself as looking at the stage from the audience. You must think of it as theatre in the round and look at it from all sides.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

There is that smaller world which is the stage, and that larger stage which is the world.

I worked in rep for six years, then I came to London and to the National Theatre. What's better than that

Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful, That's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.

I loved watching theatre, and film, and television. It was a fantastic outlet and my favourite thing to do. I can't remember the decision. It just felt like a completely natural thing... I just completely felt drawn into it and seduced by it all. I found myself going into it.

I also started to eat sensibly. The weight just dropped off.

I studied at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano: I was a theatre actor.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

Actors already striving in the theatre wouldn't dream of putting themselves on these shows; it means that only about 10% of the talent out there is being auditioned for parts.

The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?