Quotes About Theater

When I did 'Cyrano' for Roundabout, I was originally supposed to direct and play the title role, but I quickly realized that was madness, and we called in Jamie Lloyd, who directed me in Osborne's 'Inadmissible Evidence.'

To be honest with you, most of the time the ingenue roles are a little bit dull and boring, in my opinion.

I knew acting was what I wanted to do. I don't know if I was brilliant at it, but when I was doing school plays, I loved it so much I didn't want it to end. I feel like I'm exactly the same as when I was doing plays at school, to be honest.

To be honest, I didn't even know what the Drama Desk Awards were until I was nominated.

I can never remember a time when I didn't want to be an actress, to be honest. And so, all through high school, I knew that I was gonna go to college in Los Angeles. I just didn't know where. And I knew that I was gonna try to get my theater degree.

To be honest, it was a little bit of a surprise to me that my Broadway debut was a musical.

I've - to be honest with you, I've never had an acting lesson. But I've been at drama school for 50 years.

If you were to ask everyone what 'Hamlet' was about, they might say, "It's about a prince, and he says, 'To be or not to be.'"

I happen to love working in cinema, but the theater is always there... you know, and I would never shut the door on it. Even though it's been quite a bit of time since I've done a play, last one was in New York.

You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theater because it is an unmerciful life. It's six days a week. It's eight performances a week. And that's doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.

In the early '90s, there was an attention to diversity. In this country, diversity was a good thing. People would use words like 'multicultural' and like it. Now, politically, those words are out. But I still feel theaters have to be diverse in order to survive.

To survive in a profession like this, you have to have absolute discipline and commitment, and I did not quite have it for musical theater.

You thought the stage, you thought Broadway: that was the pot at the end of the rainbow. The idea of being in Hollywood was like going to the Moon or Mars.

The Broadway run of 'Memphis' has been like going to the moon. It was so great to actually open at the Shubert Theatre and then amazing to be nominated for eight Tonys and attend all the luncheons and events.

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.

My interest in theater really began in the '70s when American realism wasn't really in favor. I really dreaded going into a play that had a toaster that worked. I just didn't want to see that.

Really, I'll go anywhere at any time to continue working in theater - it's a passion that I'm thankful I still have. It keeps me creative and on my toes and meeting great people. I can't imagine a better way of working than on a play.

With theater, you have to really be able to listen and to respond to other people on stage. You're all constantly on your toes. And then with film and television, you can get a second take and things like that.

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work.

Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.'

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

Tolerance actually does exist on Broadway.

Theater actors are just tolerated. You have to be a movie star to be a celebrity.

Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina,' that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two.