Great Theater Quotes

#1. When a theater goes dark for the night, a stagehand leaves a lighted lamp on stage. No one knows why any more, but some old timers say it is to keep the ghosts away. Others say it lights the stage for the ghosts to play. Whichever theory one adheres to, most people agree: a great theater is haunted.

Emily Mann

#2. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.

Edmund White

#3. 'The Wire' was a combination of great TV and great theater.

Gbenga Akinnagbe

#4. Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

Lewis Black

#5. We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

Thornton Wilder

#6. Over the years, I've spent a lot of time in Washington. It's a great theater town.

Kevin Spacey

#7. It would have been a great story if Brooks had went out there and scored 21 points, ... That would have been great theater. But the reality of that is very difficult, as we know, in this league for any QB when defense is playing good. And the Ravens played well.

Herman Edwards

#8. I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

Laurence Olivier

#9. I love London because of the history. The times I've been there have been some of the best memories in my life. Singing there, seeing great theater - and the people like a Southern accent.

Kristin Chenoweth

#10. What's wrong with musicals now is all the gifted men who've died of AIDS-who would otherwise be here today creating great theater.

Madeline Kahn

#11. I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

Ben Brantley

#12. I'm definitely curious. I love pop culture. I'm glued to it. I can watch garbage TV, but then I can also watch great theater.

Michael Kors

#13. Being able to act for a living is a blessing. I have a great theater company that's almost 40 years old.

Gary Sinise

#14. Rage properly channeled can definitely give birth to good even great theater. Disgust, a more passive and distancing emotion, is far less likely to. Would you rush to a play called Look Back in Queasiness?

Ben Brantley

#15. No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#16. The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

Will Rogers

#17. It's so fun to do theater, because as opposed to television, you just keep doing it again and again and again - every night. Sometimes it lands beautifully, and sometimes it lands just beside of it. It's like throwing a horseshoe. It's great fun.

Missi Pyle

#18. Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows.

Annette Bening

#19. I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

Dana Carvey

#20. Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Arthur Miller

#21. I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

Arthur Miller

#22. I sing in many different colors and, hopefully, they add up to a great performance that, after you leave the theater, makes you feel like I've really shared something of myself.

Idina Menzel

#23. The things that I have done that haven't been as successful have been things that have been largely out of the public view, which is great. It's terrible, when you're a theater writer, to have a big flop publicly.

Robert Lopez

#24. Doing theater anywhere, especially in L.A., is a constant uphill battle, and there's also the unsexy parts of the business that you're faced with, like getting money. It's a really great thing to do. You feel like you're really an artist when you're doing that and you're in a company of artists.

Finn Wittrock

#25. I was in New York for a little while, doing some really bad theater. I did some great stuff, too, but there were Saturday morning theater performances in one-third-filled church basements. So, I paid my dues.

Silas Weir Mitchell

#26. Look, it's a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It's meant to be a great time at the theater, but it's also designed to work on more than one level.

Brad Bird

#27. I have a background in theater. At the time I read 'The Loved Ones' script, I was playing Catherine the Great of Russia onstage. Straight after that, I played Stella in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and Isabella in 'Measure for Measure.'

Robin McLeavy

#28. In theater, there's a lot of work to do to build the characters. It's a great experience.

Tcheky Karyo

#29. You would think that a man who's spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die-if he was to be a hero. I missed my cue for the great suicide scene

Kurt Vonnegut

#30. It would be great to do theater one day, but I don't think I'd do a musical.

Alia Shawkat

#31. Depending on what your interest in theater is, I always recommend working on plays. It's a great way to be introduced to the field, and also a great way to be seen by agents and representation. I'm also a great advocate for studying acting at a drama school or a college.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#32. I have this huge, huge fan base of people who've never seen a Broadway show, but I think it's a great introduction to what Broadway is because my shows are not that. I think that if you're getting people to go to theater then somebody should be celebrating that.

Tyler Perry

#33. I had a good theater career for years. I played Hamlet when I was 22, and I've played some really great roles.

Jason Gann

#34. I think a lot of theater actors that were great, like Walken or Glenn Close, later became film actors.

Sam Rockwell

#35. Acting as a career is a long term thing and that work is kind of progressive and you can build on a career. It's part of the great tradition of the theater to me.

Sigourney Weaver

#36. I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#37. When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

Leslie Easterbrook

#38. I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#39. Chilling Tales For Dark Nights, these people or let's say these team is trying to return the fear, the theater... Which so far is great to hear, acting in reading a story and everything one place, just awesome,

Deyth Banger

#40. I prefer theater and film. I did a little television, and obviously I'm not knocking it. It can be great, and it does pay the bills. But it's a little bit more disjointed.

Condola Rashad

#41. My husband and I oddly have worked together a couple of times. We did a 'Veronica Mars' episode together. We didn't work together, but we were both in 'Ghost World.' We had a theater company in L.A., for a bunch of years. So, we've worked together a fair amount, and it's always just great fun.

Lauren Bowles

#42. I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.

Sam Mendes

#43. It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.

Tom Stoppard

#44. People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

Charles Bukowski

#45. Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

Rachel Bloom

#46. In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.

Christopher Walken

#47. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

Jean Houston

#48. I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.

Carlisle Floyd

#49. I think theater is a great training ground; I think it's a great opportunity to play.

Tom Irwin

#50. In the evening, since I have a lot of friends in theater, we might take in a Deaf West production in North Hollywood, or, since I'm a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, they have screenings that are really great.

Tim DeKay

#51. After 30 years in the theater, I'm used to having a great amount of control over what I do. But with '24', you place your character's life in the writers' hands, and you have no idea what's going to happen until you're sent the next pages.

Cherry Jones

#52. Neither should the theater in our country be regarded as a luxury. It is a necessity because in order to make democracy work the people must increasingly participate; they can't participate unless they understand; and the theater is one of the great mediums of understanding.

Hallie Flanagan

#53. To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That's a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you've played a lot of idealized characters. So when you've got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that's interesting.

Annette Bening

#54. I think ties are great and Kathy Bates is an actress whose work I've admired tremendously over many years, and I feel a certain kinship with her, we both came from an extensive theater background.

Joan Allen

#55. Seems like everybody has seen 'Cooley High.' That's what put me on the map. Garrett Morris and I go way back, even before the movie. Great guy. We've done theater and stage plays together, Lincoln Center and all kinds of things.

Glynn Turman

#56. Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

Nevada Barr

#57. I've been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater - I'd been doing theater since college.

Stephanie Beatriz

#58. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.

David McCullough

#59. Acting was definitely half of what I loved about storytelling and about theater. So, when I get a chance to do a cameo in a show or do a movie, it's a lot of fun and it's always great stepping outside of yourself and either playing a bizarro version of yourself or playing a character.

Josh Groban

#60. I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for.

Erica Tazel

#61. The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you're going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theater because there are no second takes in front of a live audience.

Sanaa Lathan

#62. When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

Annette Bening

#63. I do think that theater is a great venue for science fiction, and not just adaptations but also original work. I also think some of the greatest classics of theater have elements of SF, but in theater, as in publishing, sometimes people make arbitrary distinctions.

Edward Einhorn

#64. When I was a kid, my daily routine was playing make-believe, and I kind of created these stories throughout the day. And when it came time to go to preschool, my English wasn't really so great because my mother wanted me to learn Ukrainian, so she signed me up for these children's theater groups.

Nina Arianda

#65. 'CSI's been a great blessing for me. It's been a platform that's allowed me to go around the country and the world, really, and speak on issues of disability, but I've never - I'm a professional actor, so I studied for years; I do theater. I never want to disrespect what got me here.

Robert David Hall

#66. Miramax can buy a small independent movie that isn't very good, but because it has great relationships with different theaters, it can get into a big theater.

Marguerite Moreau

#67. I think one of the great bits of The Muppet show is that it was set in a 19th century British theater and they live so nicely amongst that lovely old theater.

James Bobin

#68. I want to do stage again, because there just aren't words for how great it is. People say that all the time, 'There's nothing like live theater, blah blah,' but it's really true. I see a show and I know how they feel, and it feels great.

Anna Kendrick

#69. Ingmar Bergman had a great sense of humor, and he had a very special, characteristic laugh that you always recognized - if he went to watch a theater show, 'Ah! He is here tonight.'

Max Von Sydow

#70. In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.

Ridley Scott

#71. A very dear friend of mine great actress named Wendy Rich Stetson was very active in the theater department at Amherst and I went to all the plays she was in, and it became very clear to me that what she was doing was something I wanted to be doing.

John Cariani

#72. Unlike a lot of British directors, I hadn't done any theater. But, I had a great mentor who said, What you're looking for is exactly the same thing you've done in your documentaries, which is moments of emotional truth.

Susanna White

#73. What's great about New York is that there are a lot of theater actors and actresses, who are trained actors, that they bring onto the show. They're so talented, in such a weird, quirky and ominous way. And it's great to be able to work with new faces, too.

Natalie Zea

#74. A lot of actors say that theater's the thing for them. And that's great, and I'm not one to speak with any authority about it because of not having done it properly. For me, movies are what I love.

Christian Bale

#75. I did great things in the theater. I did some nice roles, 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' or 'La Vie en Rose.' And I love my role in 'Frantic.'

Emmanuelle Seigner

#76. The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.

Ingmar Bergman

#77. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

William T. Vollmann

#78. Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.

Mandy Patinkin

#79. All I wanted was to be a regional-theater actor, to be in a company. I thought it would be a great life. I don't think I understood how difficult it would be.

Julianne Moore

#80. Sometimes I have a great day of filming and sometimes the theater strikes me better. It just depends.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#81. It's great to work in film and TV, and I love it, but there's nothing that can replace that instantaneous storytelling you get in theater.

Pablo Schreiber

#82. For me, if its television, if it's theater, if it's film, and it's good, I don't make much of distinction between the 3. I think there's only so many great stories out there. If you get the chance to be a part of one, it doesn't matter what it is.

Tom Cavanagh

#83. Our goal at Home Theater Films is to inspire and entertain our audience. We want to make great movies that everyone can enjoy and elevate them with contemporary, relatable characters that naturally demonstrate their faith in real world situations.

Corbin Bernsen

#84. I had been on this improv team at this really great improv theater. It's called iO now. It used to be called Improv Olympic. They have showcases for Lorne Michaels and other writers and people who work at 'SNL' usually about once a year, although I don't know if it always happens.

Vanessa Bayer

#85. My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

Amy Bloom

#86. I gained a great deal from the period during which I worked in theater and I value those things a great deal.

Asghar Farhadi

#87. I don't consider myself a great actress. I'm just trying to stay alive, actually. I think I'm good, and I've learned a lot, certainly, mostly in the theater. I've been sloughed off movies for years. But what can you do? That's life.

Lauren Bacall

#88. The great thing about theater is that you have so much time to prepare, and to fail, before presenting it to the public. In film, the high-wire act seems to be that much farther up, and the net seems to be less there.

Chris Pine

#89. When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God's gift to the theater.

Morgan Freeman

#90. I have always felt it a great privilege to be in the theater, and I am grateful to all the playwrights who have given me so many wonderful roles. It's a terrifying business, but it has its compensations. Where else could I have found someone who for 50 years has given me sheer enchantment?

Alfred Lunt

#91. Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.

Leonard Nimoy

#92. It was a great opportunity that I had to take - my very own theater. That comes along once in a lifetime. It doesn't even seem like 15 years ago - time sure flies by. I've really had a lot of fun with it.

Lance Burton

#93. I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful, and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater, I was, in all likelihood, not going to find financial success.

David Schwimmer

#94. The great thing about improvisation is that it allows us to establish an uncensored form of theater. Freedom of speech is absolutely inherent to artistic expression.

Lucien Bourjeily

#95. Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up ... Theater of all sorts.

Ian McKellen

#96. I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.

Shelley Winters

#97. One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#98. Musical theater is great; you get painted up, you get to play princesses and witches, and you sing. The joy alone of that can really carry a lot.

Chris Pine

#99. I want to read books and go for walks and make dinner. I guess there are people who love working and that's great. I'm not one of them. I love tackling roles and I love theater, but filming, I don't get it. It seems mind-numbing to me.

Robert Sean Leonard

#100. Macbeth is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of Macbeth. It's a short play, it's an exciting play, it's easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.

Ian McKellen