Best 631 quotes in «theatre quotes» category

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view.

Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.

Chess and theatre often lead to madness.

Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family.

Coming from the theatre I have played some fabulous characters where I get to wear gowns and I get to be a princess or someone from the 1920s, or I get to wear showgirl costumes. I'm used to wearing a wardrobe that changes how I feel.

Create an atmosphere in which anything is possible.

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

'Doctor Who' was my first telly job, and before that I did a lot of theatre in education, children's theatre.

Don't let a single comic moment pass you by; then help the audience get the laughs. Give them permission to laugh by holding for laughter and by letting them know early on what they're in for. In the first few moments, the audience is gathering information, looking at the scenery and costumes. Create a comic moment as soon as you can.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.

Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they'll leave the theatre happy.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet.

Every play should be 90 minutes. There would be so many more theatre-goers if plays were shorter.

Drama - what literature does at night.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Every time I make, I've made a piece of work, I've wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you've arrived is the moment that you should stop.

Every time I listened to Lux Radio Theatre, I wanted to vomit.

Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

Film is where I want to end up, but I don't want to let go of theatre.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

Films take up so much time, and with theatre, you do have to plan a period of time that you can be free.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering. You never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

Frankly I don't listen to lyrics (a problem in that I apparently work in musical theatre) I just want a good tune that doesn't require the use of too much grey matter.

For my first acting job I played the role of Ensign Pulver in 'Mr. Roberts' at the Manitoba Theatre Centre.

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

Getting the call to be in The Goblet of Fire was like being welcomed into the most exclusive upper circle of some elite actors' club. You sit on set with the cream of the National Theatre and the RSC, all clutching wands or wearing witches' hats.

I always go back to theatre. It's probably where I'll draw my last breath.

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

Hollywood can be brutal, inhuman, the opposite of what the theatre is, and I had little desire to be part of it.

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.

He's never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing in it.

I always wanted to go into film. I love film. I loved growing up in the theatre, but I always wanted to do film all along. But, I still pursue music separately.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

I am a theatre actor, but the last ten years I've taken parts in movies because it keeps me in money.

I am a nationalist... my native soil is the theatre.

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going.

I came from the Groundlings Theatre in L.A., and there, you're guaranteed to at least try something out in front of an audience. At 'SNL,' only the best stuff gets picked, and it's taught me a very defined language of comedy. You learn the structure of a joke, which is not something I was very good at beforehand.

I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.

I did my New York debut at 21. It was “On the Town” at the George Gershwin Theatre. New York is my artistic home.