Quotes About Opening Night

#1. I've done three Broadway shows; once the curtain goes up, that's it. I mean, you prepare and you rehearse like crazy, but after opening night, the director's not there anymore, you know. He gives you notes during previews after each performance, but opening night, you're on your own.

Dennis Christopher

#2. 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

#3. Do you know what O'Keefe Says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night's exhibition.
What?
That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.

Alice Walker

#4. Anyone who shows up for a midnight opening-night screening of the latest, shiniest geek flick must be a diehard nerd. I mean, you'd have to be a killer-huge fan to wait in line for hours for the newest Star Wars or Marvel Universe film, right?

Sam Maggs

#5. The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.

Steven Spielberg

#6. I went to see 'Listen to My Heart: The Songs of David Friedman.' I have been a fan of his music for years, and I was invited to opening night because I know one of the producers.

John Edward

#7. Of course it does on opening night, but I've never had that devastating stage fright that some people get, but apparently, you can develop it.

Joan Collins

#8. The opening-night audience is mostly friends of the cast and backers of the show, and they cometo applaud their money.

Al Hirschfeld

#9. I love opening night, and I love doing plays. But one of my favorite parts about doing a play or working on a new play is rehearsal.

Betsy Brandt

#10. The good news is when you open up in Vegas, you have a lot of friends, because they all come over to see your opening night.

Yanni

#11. Now, smile-if you still can.
This is your zygomatic major muscle. Each contraction pulls your flesh apart the way tiebacks hold open the drapes in your living room window. The way cables pull aside a theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself.

Chuck Palahniuk

#12. I went to the opening of 'Sister Act,' and I had such a great time. I had no idea what it was about, and I had never seen the movies. But I heard the show went through some major last-minute craziness in previews, and man, opening night was really fun and really entertaining.

Aaron Lazar

#13. So he was opening night ... I was out of a job, and I'd been to every producer in Hollywood trying to get a job singing. But nobody wanted to know me.

Barry McGuire

#14. My junior year, I was in a play at school and five days before opening night, I still didn't know my lines. Opening night was a disaster. I was so embarrassed. The director made me work backstage for the rest of the performance.

Katie Leclerc

#15. Merridale was as self-centered as a Broadway star on opening night.

Chet Williamson

#16. Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

Chris Abani

#17. Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

Stephen Karam

#18. When you go to a show on opening night, or even the second performance, it is at the very beginning of what it will become. By the end of this run, the show will actually be what it is intended to be.

Susanna Phillips

#19. Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.

George Jean Nathan

#20. On opening night, standing under the Rogers's marquee, [Lin] realized that if Eliza's struggle was the element of Hamilton's story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy.

Jeremy McCarter

#21. As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.

Jeff Daniels

#22. Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.

George Bernard Shaw

#23. When I get your hotel and turn it into my club, I'll fuck a man on opening night in your honor. By the way, do you have any sons?

Tiffany Reisz

#24. Why not say it? I'm bursting out of my cocoon. It was all too nice in the past - it never knocked anyone out. But last year ... my first opening night at the Met - I looked out and heard all that cheering ... for me ... And I loved it.

Benita Valente

#25. My proudest moment of my career was opening night in Cambridge and watching the cast take their curtain call. No one was looking at me, and I was floating off the ground. It was just euphoric.

Sara Bareilles

#26. I'm a total Twihard. I read all the books and saw every movie on opening night with my mom.

Cassie Scerbo

#27. Film is my passion. I had no money, after Human Zoo. I was completely broke. It was horrible. My film was in Berlin on opening night, but I couldn't even get to Berlin.

Rie Rasmussen

#28. Life is not a dress rehearsal - every day is opening night.

Peter J. Daniels

#29. But you certainly don't have perspective. And there's so much pressure going into that opening night because you know there's journalists, tons of acquisitions people, and the fate of your film in some ways, if not decided, is really affected by how it screens that night.

James Ponsoldt

#30. I will tell you that we're all human beings, and we all care about what people think of us. But in general, their outlook is, "We're not looking at opening night numbers. We're not looking at opening night box office. We want this to be part of the reason you come to our service."

Mitchell Hurwitz

#31. There have been two [career highlights]. Waking up in New York to hear I'd been nominated for Best Actor for a Tony Award on Broadway, for An Ideal Husband. The other one was waking up the morning after the opening night of A Man For All Seasons and reading the reviews.

Martin Shaw

#32. I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.

Will Oldham

#33. Notwithstanding these setbacks, the dream of a beautiful American orchestra goes on, and I share Dr. King's faith that each year we move inexorably closer to a magnificent opening night.

Adam Schiff

#34. I remember when I was doing 'The Crucible' on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, 'Let's make sure we remember this.'

John Benjamin Hickey

#35. He felt like telling her his secrets, opening his heart to her, with the same honesty and freedom with which, the previous night, she had opened her body to him.

Paulo Coelho

#36. WELCOME TO THE BLACKBOARDS
This is the Cordovites' premier wormhole, where time ticks backward, trees grow down, light eats itself, fear is an opening, and life is Sovereign, Deadly, Perfect.

Marisha Pessl

#37. Haven't you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o'erhead than all but stars and angels
And children in the ships and in the towns?

Robert Frost

#38. It wasn't depression, exactly; more a weird, restless pressure that made me wander the house late at night, opening the best bottles of wine in our cellar and drinking them alone while I channel-surfed along the forgotten byways of cable TV.

Jennifer Egan

#39. I'm in a difficult position in the sense that, preposterous as this might sound, I don't like being the centre of attention. I get up on stage every night and play songs, but I almost feel the songs are the centre of attention. I don't like opening my birthday presents in front of people, either.

Alex Turner

#40. The stars sparkled above the mist shrouded tents and caravans of the carnival. The night crackled with an odd vibration, as if a veil of peculiarity settled over the company.

A.F. Stewart

#41. It was a hot sticky night in Barcelona and all the good whores had the summer flu.

Dan Jenkins

#42. Gregor, open up, I'm pleading with you.' But Gregor had absolutely no intention of opening the door and complimented himself instead on the precaution he had adopted from his business trips of locking all the doors during the night even at home.

Franz Kafka

#43. The night before the Olympics opening ceremony, my son, who is eight years old, gets very excited and likes to put out a plate of cookies and some milk for Bob Costas.

David Letterman

#44. A phase of my life was closing to-night, a
new one opening to-morrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being
accomplished.

Charlotte Bronte

#45. If Lady Gaga and Dorothy Parker had a secret love child, it would've been Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy arrived for opening nights at the Met wearing a full-length cape made entirely of orchids, while Lady Gaga shows up wearing a full-length cloak made of meat.

Karen Abbott

#46. We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"
Opening to "My Father's Son," attributed to George Orwell

George Orwell

#47. We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Jack Kornfield

#48. Usually I enjoy a first night as a surgeon enjoys an operation: this time I enjoyed it as a playgoer enjoys a pleasant performance. p 267

George Bernard Shaw

#49. From a bud of the evening a flower opens its petal in the dawn. The world sees the bud of the last night smiling with nectar on its lips. No one observed the diligence that was needed for the opening of each petal.

Pratibha Ray

#50. Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ...

Karen Russell

#51. I'm at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space.

Don DeLillo

#52. She had gone to a dinner party in her honor the night before the opening, and everyone had asked, with precisely the same intonation, as though it was a piece of urban Gregorian chant, Where have you been?

Anna Quindlen

#53. Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless emergencies, and a fleet of buses rumbled past, their doors opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times suffocating.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#54. I died on a bitter cold night. Beneath a black sky and a bruised winter moon, I tried to fly, hoping my arms might act as wings.

Jennifer Archer

#55. On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.

Emile Zola

#56. Sunset is the opening music of the night.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#57. I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

Anne Sexton

#58. I saw Ronnie Hawkins play near my hometown, Port Dover, Ontario, and I saw him play there on New Year's Eve and the following spring I booked myself to be his opening act on maybe five shows, and he hired me after the first night.

Rick Danko

#59. Once upon a time, Isola Wilde was watching late-night television with her eldest brother, Alejandro, when Channel 12 broadcast a live suicide.

Allyse Near

#60. I've been kind of listening to the composer Britten and his rendition of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The opening track is a choral section where all the weird fairies, who are played by kids in the production, sing. It's a crazy opening melody and chord sequence - really amazing.

Dev Hynes

#61. We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.

John D. MacDonald

#62. She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.

Rona Jaffe

#63. The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.

Carl Jung

#64. The great fish moved silently through the night water.

Peter Benchley

#65. And at night, leaning against the frame of her window, Kate said the word aloud to herself for the pure pleasure of saying it, listening to the lovely, liquid opening of the vowel, and the v that close and contained it.

Zibby Oneal

#66. Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that it's night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Jeanette Winterson