Quotes About Theater

I do think that theater is a great venue for science fiction, and not just adaptations but also original work. I also think some of the greatest classics of theater have elements of SF, but in theater, as in publishing, sometimes people make arbitrary distinctions.

I went to theater school but never really got the chance to do theater, and it's always been a dream of mine.

When you go watch "The Lord Of The Rings," you don't just buy a bag of popcorn, and go sit in the movie theater to watch where covetous people in our hearts deceive us, and then walk out the theater. That's the message that may be in that movie.

When student-actors see people and the way they behave when together, see the color of the sky, hear the sounds in the air, feel the ground beneath them and the wind on their faces, they get a wider view of their personal world and development in the theater is quickened. The world provides the material for the theater and artistic growth develops hand-in-hand with one's recognition of it and one's self within it.

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

I grew up in the theater, my mother is an actress, I was always around the world of acting and theater.

Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues; and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.

[Polo Is My Life] is what's called a sex book - you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he was in the sex theater in San Francisco. Most of my stories are tales of anguish, stress and grief.

There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.

I think one of the great bits of The Muppet show is that it was set in a 19th century British theater and they live so nicely amongst that lovely old theater.

I come from the theater, and I've done a lot of character work in the theater, but Hollywood stuff in film and TV, they've been more leading lady/ingenue type roles.

Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and you do the lights and the sets and you make the machine of the production work. It takes usually about ten days in the theater, two or three weeks if it's a really big musical. I mean, it's hell on earth. You just sit around forever while they adjust the lights. And every playwright with half a brain runs for the hills when tech starts because it's so boring, and you don't want to talk to the director because the director is running this giant machine.

They want families to come to New York and go to the theater, so the theater is all geared toward family entertainment. It's money, you know.

When I was in high school, I was the guy directing plays after class. I started my first theater company at 19, and my second theater company at 21. I've always been a guy who doesn't do well with the passive nature of being an actor.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.

I want to get into the theater. I really wanted to be a theater director, but I turned out to be a movie director.

At the moment, my trajectory isn't to think about acting. I'm absolutely devoted to The Imaginarium, our projects and directing. And watching and enabling other actors do their thing in our studio is hugely rewarding. I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

I've been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater - I'd been doing theater since college.

I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.

The musical theater is a glorious and distinctly American innovation in the history of theater.

I am more alive in the theater than anywhere else, but what I take into the theater I get from the streets.

When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.

What's great about New York is that there are a lot of theater actors and actresses, who are trained actors, that they bring onto the show. They're so talented, in such a weird, quirky and ominous way. And it's great to be able to work with new faces, too.

Unlike a lot of British directors, I hadn't done any theater. But, I had a great mentor who said, "What you're looking for is exactly the same thing you've done in your documentaries, which is moments of emotional truth.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

We went on the opening weekend [of Star Wars], a group of us went out and just popped into a couple theaters just to see people in the theater watching the movie, and it was incredibly gratifying just to see the thing out there being watched by people. And the reaction was more than we could've expected.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

I like to think of myself as some of the Scotch tape that holds things together - I'm very handy to have around. But all that actors really need is a bare stage. Lighting is just one of the luxuries of the theater.

Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.

From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.

I'm a classical ballet dancer, and at the end of the day I want to be with American Ballet Theater, performing classical ballets.

To be able to actually sit in a theater and watch people get off on anything that I had a part in, is just thrilling. When you work in television, it's an isolating experience. You rarely ever get to watch it with an audience.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

I feel like if I am physically and emotionally able to be at the theater, I will be there. I don't like not being there - I don't like playing hooky. I am just one of those people who feels really, really guilty if I am not there - maybe it's part of being Catholic.

There are bound to be differences in any artistic collaboration with landscape elements, or theater, of lighting elements.

I don't believe in lowest common denominators. Our focus has been on delivering value. We're rarely going to be the cheapest theater in a market. We strive to be the best.

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world.

You pay to have a good time, you don't always want to pay to be schooled or sad or reminded how bad you got it. To me a movie theater ain't always the place for that.

The musical is the one area of the theater that can give you the biggest buzz of all.

A lot of what I've had produced are plays, and I just don't want to do that. It's different than a movie, where you only have to act the scenes the one time, and you have other collaborators helping you make it better, so you don't feel as obsessed with your own mind. Plays you have to do every single night, and the thought of that is agony to me. There are days when you hate your own work, and you don't want to be confronted with that, have it coming out of your mouth or listening to somebody else say it to you. There are days you want to leave the theater and get a drink.

The biggest battle for a lot of people who come out of the theater, which is where I was trained, is that they can never forget that a camera is pointed at them.

There's nothing like the buzz of live theater. You put it out there and receive an instant reaction: laughing, crying, yelling, applauding.

When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.

One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.

I wouldnt be the same actor if I couldnt do theater.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

I did a play I think my first six months on the show, called Bullpen. Then I got involved with Theater Forty and did this play called Plastic which is about two male models coming to a casting call.

I was trained by Stella Adler for theater so you kind of give it all on every take.