Theatre Quotes
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- " It is very hard to cast a number of plays adequately from the same company of actors without several parts being miscast."
- John Gielgud
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " I think that first nights should come near the end of a play's run--as indeed, they often do."
- Peter Ustinov
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience."
- Ian McKellen
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " 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."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " There is no definitive list of the duties of a stage manager that is applicable to all theaters and staging environments. Regardless of specific duties, however, the stage manager is the individual who accepts responsibility for the smooth running of rehearsals and performances, on stage and backstage."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " You can't make theater happen without actors. The actor is the central ingredient in making theater happen. Audiences may come to theaters to see the work of stage managers, directors and producers, but the only people who can communicate theater magic to audiences, through ideas and emotions, are the actors. They are the only ones who can communicate this by themselves, and if necessary, they can get along without you. But you can't make theater without the actor."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright's work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director's artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " An interesting difference between new and experienced stage managers is that the new stage manager thinks of running the show as the most difficult and most demanding part of the job, whereas the experienced stage manager thinks of it as the most relaxing part. Perhaps the reason is that experienced stage managers have built up work habits that make then so thoroughly prepared for the production phase that they [can] sit back during performances to watch that preparation pay off."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " Festivals promote the improvement of theater. They give theater people the opportunity to meet, to present their dramatic skills and see what their fellow theater workers are doing (and how well). They offer opportunities for exchange of ideas, competition, and social contact. Participants get a chance to go on the road, to play in an unfamiliar environment. They have an opportunity to evaluate themselves by the reactions of judges and a new audience. Participants may also measure themselves by comparison to the other groups entered. Festivals often result in joyful, stimulating, exciting, and rewarding experiences."
- Lawrence Stern
Source: Stage Management
- " I have to act to live."
- Laurence Olivier
- " I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home."
- Noel Coward
- " The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. [A take-off on Oscar Wilde's "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."]"
- Tom Stoppard
- " Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open."
- George Jean Nathan
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " In a circle of light on the stage in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone. . . . This is called solitude in public. . . . You can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell."
- Konstantin Stanislavsky
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming, lighting, is to enhance the natural powers of the actor."
- Robert Edmond Jones
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players."
- Samuel Johnson
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
- Aristotle
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " A stage set should not make a pretty picture of its own. The empty stage should look formal and pleasing, but should seem to be waiting for the action to complete it; it should not hold definite significance in itself."
- G. Wilson Knight
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead."
- Robert Edmond Jones
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " A play is a painting that moves. Instead of it holding still, and you are looking at it, you hold still and it scrolls by."
- Patricia Zipprodt
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips