Quotes About Theater

When you're doing eight shows a week, you don't have much of a personal life.

It's hard to kind of marry your personal life with the theater. It always works so well for my life, and then I had kids, and the thought of missing putting them to bed is a tough one for me. You know, I'm there a lot for them.

Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.

I'm not a personality actress. I never have been. I have been a character actress.

I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively.

I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.

Theater has given me a different perspective on the way I approach films.

Peter Dinklage is one of my oldest friends from New York!

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.

I love musical theater. That's what I started off to do when I was 7, and my first show was 'Peter Pan.'

I never thought I would sing or dance - ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I'd be a character actor.

I'd done 'Peter Pan' in a little pre-K class or whatever.

My first live performance was the lead in 'Peter Pan.'

You hear about Broadway your whole life, and I learned what it meant to work on Broadway in 'The Phantom of the Opera.'

The roughest make-up I ever wore was for 'Phantom of the Opera' because the phantom's face was all disfigured, and he's trying to pass in public so he can attend his beloved opera. That was make-up over make-up.

My aunt Marcia Cope-Hart was in 'Phantom Of the Opera' in San Francisco for quite a few years when I was growing up, so we would go into the city a lot to see her.

I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs from 'The Phantom of the Opera.'

'The Phantom of the Opera' is the biggest thing I've ever done, bigger even than 'Cats' which, in itself, I never thought we'd top.

Nothing will ever be as big as 'The Phantom of the Opera' for me.

I went through a really good-looking phase from birth to 9. And then things went crazy. I don't know what happened, but between 9 and 14 it was really, really rough. I didn't have a lot of friends. The only ones who were nice to me were the theater kids. And they were like, 'You can come and join us. No one likes us.'

If drama school was like doing a BA, coming to the Court was like an MA or a PhD.

I had a big part of my life in the theater in Philadelphia. Philadelphia's changed, but I love it.

I live in Philadelphia, and my wife and I do a lot of theater out in the Philadelphia community.

As an actor, I really like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think he's a genius.