Quotes About Performance

Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I'll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.

With San Cisco, young kids are more willing to yell at whoever is standing on stage. The difference between the yelling and the quietness is if the older crowd are quiet, they're showing you respect. When you do get a cheer back from them, it's special because they are actually listening.

When I'm performing for the people, I am me, then. I am that little girl who, when she was five years old, used to sing at church. Or I'm that 15-year-old young lady who wanted to be grown and wanted to sing and couldn't wait to be smokin' a cigarette, you know?

Any young man coming of age has a lot to go through. Peter Parker certainly has a lot of responsibility, and without doubt, so does Pippin - his role, his life, and how he is going to perform it. It's all about choices and how we make them.

My thing was play as hard as you can, don't be stupid, pay attention to details, and have enough guts in the clutch that you're not afraid to make a play. Some things I thought were important for a young man to know.

The great Muhammad Ali used to have that phrase where he would say: 'Rumble young man, rumble' and 'I'm so pretty I'm ready to rumble.' I kind of just fine tuned it to 'Let's get ready to rumble.'

Now that was one thing, but from an actor's point of view, this poor young man, crying from the moment I opened the door to the moment he left. Now if an actor did that they would say he's over-acting.

The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don't do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image.

The Parent Trap wouldn't have been as special without the remarkable performances by Hayley Mills.

I really just try to focus on my job, which is to be an actor, and outside that, the cards fall where they may, and on not getting caught up in how people react to certain things. That's a death trap creatively.

I don't play comedy as comedy. That would be the biggest trap. I think about the characters and their situations. Then you don't have to worry where the laugh is going to be. But comedy is harder than drama.

One trap you can fall into when playing someone iconic is to end up doing everything in an iconic way, no matter how pedestrian or mundane that thing is.

I'm doing bass trap; I'm doing EDM songs.

In basketball, there are no trap games. If you walk out on that court and lose a game, it's because the other team beat you. You played poorly. But there's no trap game.

I'm still going to sing these songs because trap is a type of music very popular in the streets, and people want to hear it.

Living as an actor is rather like living life on the trapezes in a circus. Every time you jump on, you have to pray that, when the time comes for you to jump off, there is another trapeze swinging your way.

I did a lot of trapeze stuff when I did 'Pippin' and continued to do it afterward. Flying is so fun, and I was used to the harness idea, but these harnesses are like intense, full bodysuit things.

In Cancun, they put me up on a trapeze bar and I was carried across the ceiling over 2,000 people.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

I'm never gonna be somebody who's gonna fall down from the sky on a trapeze. That's not me. I really want to make sure that my focus stays on connecting with the audience.

I never got to see the circus... I was always in love with being a trapeze artist, though.

When I did finally get to the circus as an adult, I was very impressed by the trapeze artist. But, being 6 feet 3 inches and over 200 pounds, there was no way I could do a trapeze act. If I fell I'd take the catcher with me.