Quotes About Theater

It's a lot easier, I think, to be an actor in a movie than to spin a joke on a sitcom.

I really never thought I was that good at film. And honestly still don't. My strength is language. My background is monologues and a certain kind of Brechtian spin on theater.

I have to be invested spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically to do theater. I can't do it to make a living. I have four kids, a couple of grandkids, and two mortgages.

Once you start getting big roles as an actor, everything pays. So what are you making decisions on? It's about the director or the script or whatever. But before you reach that point, you're taking jobs with, say, a theater company, in spite of the fact that it's not paying your bills.

You don't go to a comedy and try to laugh. You laugh in spite of yourself. You don't just come on stage and cry. Something has pushed you to cry.

The chance to play a character with a split personality is an actor's dream.

I was spoiled by theater, where there is no editor.

I love the immediacy of an audience being there and reacting. I'm spoiled, having grown up in theater.

Sondheim's work especially, and musical theater like that, just spoke to me so much and taught me so many lessons.

When I was a kid, my parents told me that every time we went to see a play or musical, I would sit there with my mouth hanging open completely immersed. I think it has just always spoken to me, been the thing that makes me feel alive, seen, and the way I can express myself.

European operetta and German singspiel provided the American musical its combination of spoken dialogue and song; the inclusion of dance traced a lineage to French baroque opera. But what a difference!

To watch Lin Manuel Miranda... you could not make a better spokesperson for Broadway in a laboratory.

I'm doing 'Rock of Ages' one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I'm advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Acting is collaborative because you are working with another actor, and it's almost like a two-man juggling team. You have to really be in sync.

Standing in public in other people's clothes, pretending to be someone else. It's a strange way for a grown man to make a living.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes.

I don't like to see Shakespeare in a theater. I like to see Shakespeare in the park.

But you'll see producers and theatre owners with a billion dollars worth of theaters come in here for lunch and you know why? Because it's cheap. You see those pictures on the wall? All young actors and actresses who you will never hear about in your life... And when 'dis place is gone, the entire Broadway will slide into the East River.

I was five when I did my first show with the Mountain Play Theatre company in Marin County. I started young, and since no one in my family was involved in the industry in any way shape or form, I think everyone thought I'd do a few plays and that would be it. But then I kept doing it.