Theatre Quotes
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- " Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me."
- Neil Simon
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not it is amateur night. . . . Either musicals should be written for specified performers in the first place, or they should be cast with people who are adequate to its dancing, acting and singing demands."
- Ernest Gold
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced--although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world--what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done."
- Lillian Hellman
Source: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater
- " There is no greater gift that a person can be given than to be put in touch with his creativity. [Theatre] transformed my life. [Director Declan Donnellan on discovering theatre as a lonely 16 year old.]"
- Declan Donnellan
Source: The Guardian
- " Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' ---the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity."
- Alec Guinness
Source: My Name Escapes Me, 1996
- " The performance is not an illusionist copy of reality, its imitation; nor is it a set of conventions, accepted as a kind of deliberate game, playing at a seperate theatrical reality... The actor does not play, does not imitate, or pretend. He is himself."
- Ludwik Flaszen Flaszen
Source: Grotowski's Laboratory
- " It is not theatre that is indispensable, but something quite different. To cross the frontiers between you and me."
- Jerzy Grotowski
- " Acting is experience with something sweet behind it."
- Humphrey Bogart
- " You'd think is something one would grow out of. But you grow into it. The more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good."
- Glenda Jackson
Source: People, March 1985
- " One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price. I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality."
- Robert De Niro
- " A lot of what acting is paying attention."
- Robert Redford
- " The fun for me is knowing what the other person is saying and what my character would be thinking at that time. On the stage you get the chance to do all that, to analyze and build a part, to react, to contribute something no one else can--not the author, not even the director."
- Barry Nelson
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it."
- Elaine Stritch
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical. [variously attributed]"
- Larry Gelbart
- " It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack."
- Voltaire
- " You have two kinds of shows on Broadway -- revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is -- a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture."
- Stephen Sondheim
Source: NY Times 3/12/00
- " In creating and performing in a play, there is a sense of common purpose, of living something outside of yourself, of hauling to one common goal. All these different artistic disciplines are corralled into one purpose, and in the process, incredibly strong bonds are created."
- Eric Stern
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show--all are family."
- John Kander
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Your eyes will always go to red, which is why there is a lady in red in all my shows."
- Florence Klotz
Source: It Happened On Broadway
- " Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone."
- Jules Fisher
Source: It Happened On Broadway