Best 414 quotes in «theater quotes» category

When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.

When you open a book it's like going to the theater first you see the curtain then it is pulled aside and the show begins.

When you're an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.

When you think about it, what other playwrights are there besides O'Neill, Tennessee and me?

Whether it be current or past, every single song that I recorded is about me. It's a peek into my life, past and present. Maybe it's coming from my theater and performance background, but nothing felt right unless I could relate to it.

Whoever becomes the head of the National Theater finds himself in a position like that of Nelson's Column - pigeons dump on you because you're there.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

With the exception of lingerie and theater I'm interested in everything to do with clothes and perfumes: everything which is an extension of woman.

With my background, I came out of the theater.

Yeah, I do get to do some theater occasionally. I don't get to do it as much as I would like to.

You create this situation where you are so dependent on each other. That's especially true for film. In theater, the actor has much more say, much more control, for better or worse.

You know, I think I was always intrigued by theater since I was a small child.

You have to transmit to them what its like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

You have to pay so much to see theater, even in Chicago. In the Greek theater, you didn't have to pay anything. You actually had to go, and you just sat there all day.

You will not leave the theater with nothing to talk about. For me, comedy and tragedy when you get them both in one evening, that's the most satisfying.

You will see a 3-D movie in a movie theater for the shared experience of it - or for a date, and so on. You don't all sit at home getting your entertainment in a vacuum.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

Acting, like love, is a lonely pursuit.

Actors--a stage kiss is only meant to last ten seconds. Any longer and it is considered abuse, dear.

As good surgical doctor works on a patient in the theater with varied kinds of surgical instruments, so a true leader also needs a clean bag of leadership characters that vary from task to task. One-way leaders are obvious failures!

A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show.

All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves....

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who’s the better writer?

A new star has been born and Vera’s performance brings alive the desolate life of O’Neil’s young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.

Any earthly production would have been cancelled at the slightest suggestion of rain, but this was William’s Stage—it was William’s call—and if the children danced and the congregation remained transfixed, the show would go on.

Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.

Chilling Tales For Dark Nights, these people or let's say these team is trying to return the fear, the theater... Which so far is great to hear, acting in reading a story and everything one place, just awesome,

Did I tell you what happened at the play? We were at the back of the theatre, standing there in the dark, when all of a sudden I feel one of 'em tug at my sleeve, whispers, "Trudy look!" I said, "Yeah, goosebumps. You definitely got goosebumps. You like the play that much?" They said it wasn't the play that gave 'em goosebumps, it was the audience! I'd forgot to tell them to watch the play; they'd been watching the audience! Yeah, to see a group of people sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying at the same things...well that just knocked 'em out! They said, "Trudy, the play was soup, the audience, art." So they're taking goosbumps back with 'em into space. Goosebumps! Quite a souvenir. I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll laugh. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll cry. And maybe, one day we'll do something so magnificent, the whole universe will get goosebumps.

Don't wear green in your dressing room,' suggested Miss Spink. 'Or mention the Scottish play," added Miss Forcible.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

Doug: I would not wipe my ass with your manuscript. Would you like to know why? Bob: Sure Doug: Because there is crap already all over it.

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

Every creative act involves a leap into the void. The leap has to occur at the right moment and yet the time for the leap is never prescribed. In the midst of a leap, there are no guarantees. To leap can often cause acute embarrassment. Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act—a key collaborator.

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed: Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical. Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed: (Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".) Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed: Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.

If Patti Lupone was born to play Evita then Madonna was born to play Patti Lupone playing Evita.

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.

In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage...

Important is not so much our place in the theater of the world but our acceptance in the theater of our inner self. ("Victory daze" )

Improvisation is the power of spontaneous observation.

In all of time, all of space, there will only be one you. How can you be anything but perfect? As you are. Mad, sad, glad. You are amazing.

I was truly happy. But my state was not that of any ordinary satisfaction. It was a joy which stemmed directly from creative, artistic achievement.

It's about that applause I want to speak to you. I want you to remember that when you've done a little dance or a song or sketch, the applause which you get is not only because you yourself have done your best, but because each of those men is seeing in you someone he loves at home, and because of you is able to forget for a little while the unhappiness of not being in his home, and in some cases the great tragedy of not knowing what has happened to the children in his family.

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.

Lin says the sensation of standing in the middle of these unsettling effects is a distilled version of how he feels throughout the show: "I am staying in my lane and doing what I'm supposed to do while everyone is doing what they do at the height of their abilities, and if I move to the left or right, I'll get hit with a desk.

My life written as a theater production would be considered a tragedy. My life written by the good times experienced, would be considered a fairytale.

Magnus had caught it gingerly, half expecting it to blow in his face. The Teacher chuckled. "Don't worry, it can't do anything without fire." The thing looked and felt pretty innocuous, actually. It was shorter and fatter than a candlestick, and not colored red like it was in the comic books or the new Technicolor cartoons that still ran at the cinema every Saturday afternoon. Magnus had no money for such things anymore, but sometimes he and Kiki- another boy who worked for the Resistance- sneaked into the theater through an unlocked window.