Quotes About Audience

I came from the Groundlings Theatre in L.A., and there, you're guaranteed to at least try something out in front of an audience. At 'SNL,' only the best stuff gets picked, and it's taught me a very defined language of comedy. You learn the structure of a joke, which is not something I was very good at beforehand.

I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!

Theatre is live content, and you can tell if you have worked your audience.

If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.

My mother asks when I will do some theatre, and there is something about getting your 15 minute call. That is what you become an actor for - performing in front of people and getting the love from the audience.

Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah - now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall?

I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.

When I listen to a script, it has to be entertaining. People who come to theatre should be happy and entertained.

I've done movies with Oliver Stone and Michael Mann. And I've done quite a few dramas in my time, from the theatre to film work. I just think the audience is used to seeing me on 'Saturday Night Live,' and 'K-9,' and 'Curly Sue' and of course, 'According to Jim.' I think that my comedies have been the most popular.

When someone goes to watch my film in the theatre, they won't remember the last four articles they read about me. Instead, they will think about the last film I did.

I personally enjoy theatre, but preferably I do films so that I can reach up to maximum audience. If you want to give a serious message, it will reach out to maximum people through films. But through theatre, you can hardly reach out to about 3,000 audience at a time.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

I think the genre of musical theatre, when it started, the pop songwriters of the time were writing the music. I think sometimes when we write musicals now, we keep writing in that same style, as though that's the musical theatre genre... We have to figure out how to tell stories with the music that we listen to now, or we'll lose our audience.

People come to the theatre to be excited and uplifted - I want to inspire my audience.

I do still like television very much, but the theatre does really have something special about it.

Also, if you want to reach people, theatre is not always the best way to do it.

The best theatre I've done, I've done right here in this living room.

I did theatre when I was nine, I think. Nine and ten, and that was just the beginning of my whole involvement in acting, my whole interest. I don't really remember it that well. But it was really fun. I mean, it was exciting just to be on stage in front of an audience. It gives you a different kind of rush.

I've done panel shows, which I enjoy, and on those you're recording half-an-hour of TV and sometimes they film for two hours. But with 'Britain's Got Talent,' you're on camera for eight hours, with a large theatre audience watching - and in between you're being filmed for ITV2 as you eat your lunch.

When it is good, theatre takes a lot of beating both to watch and perform.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.