Top 99 Quotes About Live Theater
#1. Live theater to me is much more free than the movies or television.
Eartha Kitt
#2. Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.
Val Kilmer
#3. Good live theater disturbs molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between you and the audience. Anybody who sees live theater should come out a little rearranged.
Glenn Close
#4. 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
#5. The discipline of live theater - doing the same perfect thing night after night, eight times a week - never ceases to amaze me
Neil Patrick Harris
#6. We didn't have a lot of live theater in Oklahoma. I didn't visit New York when I was growing up. I watched movie musicals, and I believed in an idealistic, idyllic version of Broadway.
Kelli O'Hara
#7. Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.
Harry Connick Jr.
#8. I love live theater; I like the relationship between the show and the audience. That's my comfort zone, but more than anything, it's what makes me happy.
Kristin Chenoweth
#9. I have a company in the U.K., a performance-capture studio. We're looking to push the boundaries of performance-capture technology in film and video games, but also in live theater, using real-time performance capture with actors onstage, and combining that with holographic imagery.
Andy Serkis
#10. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
John Logan
#11. I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.
Angela Lansbury
#12. I still find new things every night, which is the beauty and fun of live theater. It's a living, breathing art form.
Brandon Uranowitz
#13. This sounds so bogus, but I would love to, at some point when my kids are in college, is just go do a whole season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and do a year of plays. Most actors miss the days of live theater.
Donal Logue
#14. For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.
Terry Teachout
#15. As a student studying acting, I was always broke, so going to see any live theater was almost impossible.
Jesse L. Martin
#16. Live theater is my favorite of all the mediums that I have worked in, so I have every intention on coming back to Broadway.
Taye Diggs
#17. If I had to pick one form of acting, it would be live theater. That's where I started; that's where I became a man, I think I'm still finishing up that job.
Nick Offerman
#18. I went into performing for the community. Being backstage with your company of fellows is the best part of working in live theater. That energy, that combined focus, the synergy - it's addictive.
Jason Alexander
#19. I think film requires a lot more patience and concentration and each day you're keeping the entire picture in your head throughout a two to three month film shoot. Whereas TV, especially half hour, is like doing a play a week or live theater.
Shawnee Smith
#20. From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.
Philip Baker Hall
#21. Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.
Louise Fletcher
#22. That's why I love doing live theater more than anything: You get an immediate reaction, whether it's good or bad.
Jane Krakowski
#23. There's nothing like the buzz of live theater. You put it out there and receive an instant reaction: laughing, crying, yelling, applauding.
Samantha Barks
#24. Theater in Chicago will always be my first love. It started careers for me and about 50 of my friends. We all love coming back. As soon as the TV show is over, I'll be back in Chicago, doing live theater.
William Petersen
#26. In theater, the show must go on, so you train yourself to be able to nail it every single time because that's what the audience deserves, and that's the magic of live theater.
Corey Reynolds
#27. Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.
Terry Teachout
#28. There's just something about getting up, putting it out there, and getting this exchange of energy. Whether your audience is a camera lens, or live theater, or whatever it is, just putting that out there and getting it back is just an honor.
Lauren Bowles
#29. I love flexing theater muscles. Television has merits as well, but there's no substitute for live theater.
Eddie Cahill
#30. I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there's special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.
Geoffrey Rush
#31. Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.
Jenna Elfman
#32. I want to be back on Broadway one day. That's a dream of mine. There's nothing like live theater, and I think it's so important for me to be able to be on stage with an audience that responds.
Naturi Naughton
#33. Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.
Terry Teachout
#34. The energy of live theater is indescribable. You are just in the moment for an hour and a half.
Adrianne Palicki
#35. So I've done my fair share of theater. I have also been very fortunate in that I've been able to come to New York two or three times a year just to see as many shows as possible. I think the live theater culture here is incredible.
Neil Patrick Harris
#36. I went to a theater arts school, so I'm interested in many different projects, whether it be film, television or even live theater. I'm a performer. That's what I do. That's what I want to do.
Derek Hough
#37. There are no taking days off. There are no distractions. If I had that, I physically wouldn't be capable of going onstage and performing live theater. It's extremely demanding. I have to be in ballet class every day.
Misty Copeland
#38. Pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games.
Gary Gygax
#39. I think of my father and how confused he was by me. He understood my love for theater, and he understood that New York City was the only place that it was happening in America, really, in any live way.
Spalding Gray
#40. Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started.
Christopher Reeve
#41. I live in Philadelphia, and my wife and I do a lot of theater out in the Philadelphia community.
Rob McClure
#42. The home of Rugby Union is in Twickenham - just outside London in the suburbs, where I live. I'm mad for it. The trouble with being an actor and being in the theater is that you always miss the games.
Alexander Hanson
#43. I would feel ill without theater. It's kind of a cliche, but every time you make a mistake, you really do have to learn from it to move on. When you're doing something live, there's no time to dwell. Hopefully you'll laugh it off, but if not, you can always take a day to hate yourself.
Nina Arianda
#44. The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months, or even three months.
Treat Williams
#45. If you love acting and you've ever experienced theater, then you know that in a movie it's almost impossible to live out that experience, unless you're a Pacino or a De Niro or somebody who gets to pick their parts.
Scott Caan
#46. The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah' - Non-injury is the highest religion.
Virchand Gandhi
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Just as theater has to be where people live, actors have to go out in the marketplace - not be cut off by a lens. Either an artist grows or he stagnates.
Ralph Waite
#50. We film in front of a live audience, and I was a theater actor before I got into television, so I like that.
Jillian Bach
#51. When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to live in the Hollywood Hills, behind Grauman's Theater, and I'd always hit the matinees.
J. D. Souther
#52. Theater is all about the rehearsal process. In fact, I think a lot of times opening night there's a mixed sadness because you're finished with a lot of people's favorite part of the process, which is finding the character and discovering it, and then you get to live it.
Debra Winger
#53. I'd love to go back and do theater. There's nothing like that instant response and the connection to a live audience.
Bellamy Young
#54. One of my favorite things about Tom Waits is not only his songs, but when he does do live shows, it's the theatrics involved. It's like Kabuki theater, really old-fashioned theatrics. Like, standing on top of a piece of plywood lying on some cinderblocks and clapping his hands, banging on a bucket.
Brittany Howard
#55. Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.
Eli Wallach
#56. For me, I can't live without acting or drama and writing - I also run a theater company.
Tom Cullen
#57. I still get excited performing live. when you see the immediate reaction from a crowd, its like being a theater performer, its something you can't get from being a writer or being an ad man ... its almost ritualistic.
Marilyn Manson
#58. I don't want to play a laptop live if I'm just going to sit there, so it's also a problem of working at my movie theater job long enough to get money to get better equipment.
Kyle Parker
#59. The theater's a live thing, and film is, to some extent, a discipline where you're putting everything together and trying to execute something exactly. You do it away from people and then you present it at the end.
Clive Owen
#60. I would love to do a live show with dancers and fashion and scenic elements - definitely bring my love of the theater to a concert-style performance.
Adam Lambert
#61. On television, you have an intimate moment with the camera. In theater, you are making something live with people there. My brain doesn't understand that you don't get another take ever. I'm finally learning on TV that you can do something over if you make a mistake.
Kirsten Vangsness
#62. It's great to do theater and have the live response and know what that can bring to a performance. I like to juggle as many mediums as I can.
Rose McIver
#63. I've made six films since I made Secrets and Lies but I still live in London and I'd love to do theater.
Brenda Blethyn
#64. I wasn't a glamour-puss, and there were more interesting roles for an actress like me in the theater and in live television.
Nancy Marchand
#65. Whether I'm directing live action or animation, my responsibility is the same. I have an audience sitting in a theater with their popcorn, and I've got to show them a good time and make them feel something.
Lee Unkrich
#66. Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille Paglia
#67. Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you
if you don't mind my saying so?
Luigi Pirandello
#68. I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.
Stephen Sondheim
#69. I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.
Lady Gaga
#70. All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.
Edna Ferber
#71. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.
Diane Setterfield
#72. I was probably singing before I could talk. Musical theater is my passion. If I could afford it, I would just do dinner theater and live a simple life.
Bethany Joy Lenz
#73. I really enjoy theater. Performing live onstage is helping me to grow as an actress.
Kim Fields
#74. I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?
Karen Allen
#75. I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.
Pauline Kael
#76. Nothing against comedy clubs, they work. But when you're sitting with a tablecloth and a candle and an appetizer menu, three-drink minimum, it can feel more like a dinner theater than a live experience.
Doug Stanhope
#77. If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like.
Fran Lebowitz
#78. Immediate gratification of a live audience makes me come alive. I miss performing in theater. I'll make my return to the stage eventually.
Brendan Dooling
#79. Every time I go to the theater, there's something about the atmosphere, seeing something unfold live in front of an audience, that you can't get out of your system.
John Madden
#80. It's important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream.
David Lynch
#81. 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
#82. I have never directed anything for the stage. I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#83. I think people want the intimacy in the engagement of sitting in a theater with people and seeing something happen live and engage in that. I think that could be a very powerful experience.
Colin Callender
#84. Doing theater, I call it concentrated shampoo. You put a dime in the palm of your hand and you get a headful of lather. When you do a play, you're there for two and a half hours, and you live a lifetime.
Richard Kind
#85. If you want to be a theater actor, where do you live now? Young actors struggle on a Broadway salary. A lot of them live in shoe boxes; some of them are literally three to a shoebox. New York has gotten prohibitively expensive.
Stephen Spinella
#86. In the middle 1940s ... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.
Bill Dixon
#87. I do think that it's better for a musical to live its life first because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You've seen it. And that's the mystery of a musical that hasn't been filmed. You're bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#88. 'Scandal' has been, for me, the most consistent time I've ever logged in front of a camera. I grew up in the theater, and I feel very confident and comfortable on the stage and in front of a live audience, but the camera is a very different medium.
Katie Lowes
#89. I live in New York City, where, if you're in a movie at a popular independent theater, you think you're king of the world, because you're in a bubble. So there's no way for me to properly conceive of the attention that the movie gets in a way that doesn't make me confused.
Jesse Eisenberg
#90. The adrenaline of a live performance is unlike anything in film or theater. I can see why it's so addictive.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#91. I did a number of local children's theater plays growing up, but in 5th grade, I had some good times on stage making people laugh as a troll in 'The Hobbit.' That solidified my dream to be on 'Saturday Night Live,' which was hugely influential for me growing up.
Lauren Lapkus
#92. My show in Egypt was called, 'The Show,' or, 'Al Bernameg' in Arabic. Basically, it was a political satire show. It started on Internet by three, four-minute episodes, and then it evolved into a live show in a theater, which was something that was unprecedented in the Arab world.
Bassem Youssef
#93. The TV show I do ['Dr Quinn'] is the day job that enables me to work with this theater [Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble]. That's all I live for. That's what I care about. There's no dough in it. Nothing to do but lose money. But it's all from the heart, and that's why it's so much fun.
Orson Bean
#94. 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
#95. Yes, yes, theater in general is just going to always be my first love, performing for a live audience.
Megan Hilty
#96. All I've done is live my life in the theater and loved it.
Marian Seldes
#97. What if Theater was the Pong of the the digital Ping?
A place where the live experience has an function?
Natasha Tsakos
#98. I love the theater. I love being on stage; I love the live audience. I also love dressing up and all of the make-believe.
Nicole Ari Parker
#99. I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
Zoe Kazan
