Quotes About Theater

Chicago theater vs. New York theater. There's just nothing to say about it really. If you've seen Chicago theater, you know that the work is true to what is there on the page. It's not trying to present itself with some sort of flashy, concept-based thing. It's about the work, and it's about the acting you're about to watch. So acting-based theater feels like it was born there to me.

I'm constantly involved in theater, looking at theater, trying to do work in theater, support theater. And that's kind of my creative passion.

It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.

I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.

I think I'm better wired for television. I love variety as far as a project. I'm easily bored and the schedule of a television show, it just keeps you going. I love theater and I think doing a sitcom in front of a live audience is the closest you can get to theater, and it's really the best mix of like standup and theater, is really a sitcom. I started as a standup and I still continue to do that as well, so I think I'm just a TV guy and happy for it. I think my movie career is kind of like my social life, I'm picky and not in demand. So it perhaps is working out.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived

My background is in theater. I was a theater major in college.

I know how I felt when I saw things like 'Fame' on television when I was growing up and how that was an exceptional magnet for me to want to explore the theater. I can only assume that 'Smash' is doing that for anyone who is halfway interested in theater already.

I have a children's theater background, so I grew up performing for child audiences; it's sort of my specialty. I know the child audience pretty well - or felt like I did because I performed for them so much. I studied a lot about the child audience, about theater. So it was naturally a place that I gravitated to.

My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.

I started in theater, and I love to go back to theater, just to have the experience and recharge my batteries, creatively.

At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.

I came to America to become an architect. And somewhere along the line while I was still in school, I was lured into theater, and that's how I became interested in theater. My first play was something called "A Banquet for the Moon." It was a weird play.

Well, I'm... first and foremost I'm a theater guy and everything that I know comes from the theater.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."

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

The cast, staff, and crew of a live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Thus, theater is necessarily a group effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats-a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the others, and may overlap others in function when necessary. But each autocrat assumes distinct responsibilities and accepts them completely.

I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.

Good live theater disturbs molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between you and the audience. Anybody who sees live theater should come out a little rearranged.

the theater should be free to the people just as the Public Library is free, just as the museum is free. ... I want the theater to be made accessible to the people.

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 don't think theater is dying, and musicals are a great American art form. We've got apple pie, jazz and musical theater.

I’ve always been in the theater. I’ve always gone to it. That’s been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running - fleeing - to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.

I learned my business in the theater and in television, particularly working with the actors. You can learn much more in the theater than directing a movie, because then you have no time when you are shooting a movie to really work with the actors. You have to learn this craft somewhere else.

Always continue to perform no matter what or where the activity is: local theater, regional theater, local clubs or coffee shops. Continue to play the guitar or your instrument and always continue to progress or otherwise you will fail.

Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.

I think the New York theater audience is very savvy. Sometimes you get newbies who think they're going to be watching Smash onstage, and sometimes you have people who have been coming to theater for years. It's the combination of those people in an audience that makes for a pretty amazing night - their ability to give each other permission to react and enjoy, in a way that maybe they wouldn't if they weren't sitting next to each other.

When people in my generation started to write, we did not actually have much of a movie industry, much of a theater scene, much of a television industry or other creative outlets. But we had a lot of aspiring writers. All that has changed. We now have a movie industry, television industry and lots of theater. But we have retained a large contingent of writers and a dedicated readership. The larger number of people in society who value writing, the larger number of good writers will be produced. That's my belief. It raises the bar.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I've studied theater since high school. Of course, it's a different story altogether being on Broadway, but it's still theater, and you have to be in front of a live audience, and that's very exciting. It's something I've definitely wanted to do, but I got involved in movies and television, and then it became a luxury to get back on the stage.

I've always been into theater and movies. When I was in school, I did a monologue for my talent show. I would go to the local theater. I was always in dance. I was always performing. That was always my thing.

So I've done my fair share of theater. I have also been very fortunate in that I've been able to come to New York two or three times a year just to see as many shows as possible. I think the live theater culture here is incredible.

Music is for theater like theater is for scripts. It's total: it's cyclical.

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

Surely, you go to the theater because you want to have a great evening in the theater.

I just always liked the company. The people who hung around her were amazing storytellers, whether it was actors or crew. They were just exciting people. And I knew that they were different when I would go see a friend or stay at someone else's house. It just wasn't as cool. So I always loved the theater, and that's where I started: at a theater up in Canada.

You have in Vegas the most heterogeneous audience you're gonna get anywhere in the country. In Boston, Chicago, Miami, you know who goes to the theater. In Vegas, you have people who only see one theater show a year, and it's in Vegas.

If I do a lot of television, than I miss theater. If I do a lot of theater, than I miss film. This global thing of performing arts gives me strength.

I always think that the difference between film and theater is like the difference between masturbation and making love. Because, in film, you just have to get one moment right; you're practically by yourself. And in theater, you actually have to have a relationship with the audience.

It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.

The whole idea of action being a carrier of information is something that comes directly from theater. That's, in some ways, the one thing I've been trying to contribute. I still write things outside of architecture - not really fiction, but not nonfiction. I like dialogue as a form, because the text is only the trace of an action. The consequential information is carried in the action you choose to put on that text.

The theater is magical and addictive.

I wake up in the morning and I lie in bed, and it's the time I call "the theater of morning." All these thoughts run around in my head, between my ears when I'm waking up. It's not a dream state, but it's not completely awake either. So all these metaphors run around and then I pick one and I get out of bed and I do it. I'm very lucky.

It seems to me that the thing that makes the theater worthwhile is the fact that it attracts so many people with ideas who are constantly trying to share them with the public. Real art is illumination. It gives a man an idea he never had before or lights up ideas that were formless or only lurking in the shadows of his mind. It adds stature to life.

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.