Quotes About Theater

Behind the footlights there is always the applause, which stimulates the actors. On the screen it is a different matter.

Within the theater lies the power to stimulate and alter the hearts and minds of both the privileged and those who have too long been denied.

Dan Curtis, our producer, has the idea that people like to see a stock company of actors.

I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons - 10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me.

The pace is so fast in summer stock. In college shows, there is more time for rehearsals.

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

The stock company, as I knew it is dead. Road companies are few and far between. Still the theater must survive.

I admit we don't know for sure the exact spot where the original Globe stood. But the Greenmore Wharf site is as nearly right as we can figure.

After 'Othello,' it was, like, 'I can stop acting. I have played one of the great characters in the English language. I feel I have played him well and honorably. I have nothing to prove anymore.'

I did school plays, and then, at the age of 18, I applied to drama school in London, and I got in. I've been very lucky that no one so far has stopped me from being able to live my dream - the industry or my parents.

I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

In college, I stopped doing pre-med and went into theater, and then I moved to San Francisco and lived there for five years.

With a lot of contemporary musicals, the songs are like a calling card: the action stops for them.

When I am on a long run in a play, I'm not sure how I would fill the days if I did not paint or write. On a basic level, it just stops me going crazy.

I steal props from 'SNL' a great deal. Almost every sketch I'm in, I try to grab something from it, so I have a storage space full of props.

The store experience must become a performance, with the energy and precision of a Broadway play.

The point of acting is to pretend you're someone else and sell a story.

One of the things that makes you want to be an actor, speaking only for myself, is that there's something infantile about it. You're suspending disbelief, pretending and entering into a story world.

On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.

What happens in improv is you create your own storyline.

Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.

I was a theater actor back in the U.K., and you knew the whole play, so you could plot your storyline and character. And then I did 'Lost' and didn't know, and it was kind of frustrating, but I enjoyed it.

I'm a director's actor; I'm a storyteller's actor.

It's fun to do accents; it's fun to do different periods - that's why you become an actor. Because it's fun to be a storyteller and play make-believe.