Theatre Quotes

We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ...a much more integrative experience.

We're so bereft of support of theatre in this day and age.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.

Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.

Despite a large body of work in films, TV, theatre and concerts, I am viewed by many as a Jewish artist. I do not resent the label, except for the fact that I disapprove of labels in general.

This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God's righteous Kingdom.

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'

I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

I come out of repertory theatre so I've been working under pressure my whole career.

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next.

I love old movies. The '40s theatre pace is fantastic.

My mother's side of the family was in the production side of theatre. My grandfather, Jose Vega, was a general manager for Neil Simon shows on Broadway.

I've found that the only way to make theatre that gets the audience thinking is when I feel uncomfortable making it.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books.

When you come into a movie theatre, there are no windows, you don't hear the sound outside and you're ready for fantasy.

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

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.

In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors

The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven't.

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.

Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?

My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.

Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley.

I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.

I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre.

I'd like more kids to go and see theatre because it really is amazing.

Theatre is more exciting in the sense that you can actually see the audience in the eye. You know there are no takes and retakes. You have one chance to do your job... and you better do it well!

Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.

Having started out in theatre, I feel an impulse to do it as much as I can

A good actor makes clear the meaning of the words. A better actor gives also the emotion of the part. The best actor adds emotion of which the character is unconscious.

Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

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.

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

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

I didn't want to get into acting just to play bystanders. I feel a bystander enough in my own life. And I do think that theatre can contribute to a certain analysis and commentary on our own world.

I initially told people I wanted to be a dancer and ultimately a "Rockette." I didn't really know what a musical theatre performer was other than the Shirley Temple type.

From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.