Quotes About Theater

I've heard about productions where it still happens: yellow face, taping up the eyes. It's hard to talk about it in a constructive way.

Yes, it's true, I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.

The road's a tough life, but I said 'yes,' because as a kid growing up in Ohio, I never had a chance to see a Tony-winning actress in a role she won the Tony for.

You can't just sort of come with, say, 'Yesterday,' or 'A Hard Day's Night,' and it be in the wrong place in the wrong show, and expect the song to work theatrically.

Growing up in California, my best friend was Morris Rabinowitz and we often went to the Yiddish Theater.

My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.

When I was a senior in high school, I worked at a theater where they hired New York actors. And they told me about 'Backstage,' and so I got my school in Pennsylvania to subscribe. And there was an audition for a tour of 'The Sound of Music,' and I got the job. Deferred my admission to college just to go on tour.

I did a play called 'On Golden Pond' in a dinner theater in Maine and then went to New York for a talent competition having put together a three-man juggling routine and some one-liners and I got myself an agent from that.

I was on vacation in New York when my agent called asking if I wanted to go right in and audition for 'Billy Elliot,' so I was lucky to be there.

I grew up in Wisconsin. It's not like growing up in New York or L.A., where you know somebody's cousin who does this. It was in the back of my mind, but I would never say that I wanted to be an actor, but as I look back, I was in every play I could possibly be in.

I was invited to a couple of races, but I was doing a play in New York.

One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.

When you have a job you know you'd do for free, it takes a lot of the pressure away to be successful at it. So if it's doing theater in New York or teaching acting, I'm down for all of it.

'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.'

It's more than sentimental for me to be working in theater in New York; it's very personal. I think it's a spiritual experience for me.

I was fired from my first job in New York. I was just out of school, doing the Welsh play, 'The Corn Is Green,' at Equity Library Theater. I was studying with Uta Hagen, and I was really working well, but they got nervous. They wanted results right away. We had a run-through, and I wasn't there yet, so they fired me.

I'd like to do a play in New York.

I've taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

The time and preparation before a play is something I really value, and it's something I learned in New York.