Quotes About Theater Audience

#1. I first felt successful when I was 13 and in a show called Seesaw. I came offstage and heard the applause of the theater audience and felt a sense of accomplishment. Around that time my role model for success was Burt Lancaster. He was one of the first ac.

Giancarlo Esposito

#2. The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.

Joan Fontaine

#3. If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it.

Carlisle Floyd

#4. I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

Jerry Hall

#5. This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

Carl Jung

#6. In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.

Stephen Sondheim

#7. I enjoy theater just for the sheer excitement of it and the immediate response that you get, and how every night the audience is a little bit different; but then, it's expensive to work in N.Y., and stage work is limited, so you're just doing it for the art.

Dorian Missick

#8. I've done a lot of theater, and I know that it's a different audience each time who doesn't know the story, and we have to tell it.

Courtney B. Vance

#9. There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience.

Wole Soyinka

#10. Initially, I had started doing theater, where the actor has a direct relationship to the audience. So, moving into film and television disconnected me. When you do a film, you start to get the character, and then it disappears for a year before it's released and you get feedback.

Matthew Davis

#11. I come from a theater background, and if you're doing a play, your audience is right there, and you're able to have that one-on-one experience. Doing more TV now, when fans come up to me on the street and talk to me on social media, that's a way to bridge that gap.

Samira Wiley

#12. When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.

Suzanne Farrell

#13. I think theater and church are so relatable because it's traditional call-and-response in the way that an audience interacts with the actors.

Danielle Brooks

#14. With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.

Emma Donoghue

#15. I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.

Adam Driver

#16. I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

Elizabeth Strout

#17. To be able to actually sit in a theater and watch people get off on anything that I had a part in, is just thrilling. When you work in television, it's an isolating experience. You rarely ever get to watch it with an audience.

Marti Noxon

#18. 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

#19. But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That's why I call it the most social of the various art forms.

Wole Soyinka

#20. ... both spiritual teachers and preachers fall into the trap of using imprecise, emotional mumbo jumbo - if you can't define it or explain it, then it's mumbo jumbo - to connect with an audience. The audience reads into it what they want, and it makes for good theater.

Gudjon Bergmann

#21. I really like reaching out and seeing the audience - they're potential audiences! And on occasion I can make them excited about going to the theater again, if they've ceased or gone less.

Harold Prince

#22. I love the chemistry that can be created onstage between the actors and the audience. It's molecular, even, the energies that can go back and forth. I started in theater, and when I first went into movies, I felt that my energy was going to blow out the camera.

Glenn Close

#23. I prefer theater, but I love to do films, and I prefer theater primarily because I've done more. I know less about movies. You can't lie in either medium. The wonderful thing is that the camera, just like an audience, is made out of skin - because celluloid is skin.

Amanda Plummer

#24. In theater, you're in charge of your performance, and at the end of the day you're the one who gets credit because you're in front of the audience doing it, and in film and TV it's the director who gets to decide when to cut to you on a line, which take he uses.

Jonathan Groff

#25. Violence and nonviolence are, after all, two different forms of theater. They both depend and thrive on the response of an audience.

Julia Bacha

#26. 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

#27. In the theater, I've found that, in general, reaction and laughter come easier at an evening performance, when the audience is more inclined to forget its troubles. Matinee customers must enter the theatre in a more matter-of-fact frame of mind, hanging on tightly before they let themselves go.

Beatrice Lillie

#28. I'm trying to bring a new generation into the musical theater and to create a new audience.

Jerry Herman

#29. Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.

Stephen Moyer

#30. One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up, is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.

William Petersen

#31. 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

#32. I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response.

David Anders

#33. In movies, you can basically buy the audience into the theater. If you spend enough money on visual effects, even if you are lacking in story and character, you might still pull it off.

Doug Liman

#34. My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.

Twyla Tharp

#35. Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

Jack Bowman

#36. 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

#37. Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!

Adam Pascal

#38. 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

#39. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.

Richard Brautigan

#40. What I always loved about theater is that that's an experience that a company of actors just sinks itself into for weeks, and you really get to work on the material, and by the time you're in front of an audience, you really own it.

Zeljko Ivanek

#41. Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

Richard Foreman

#42. 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

#43. In theater, you really work out the kinks and figure out exactly what you want to do and what we want to say, so by the time we have an audience, we're really prepared. With TV, you have a day ... Sometimes, just a few hours.

Amber Stevens

#44. I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

Orson Welles

#45. In theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience, and you're in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors. It's as simple as that.

Diego Luna

#46. A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.

Lisa Randall

#47. In theater, the wellspring of the character comes from the doing of it, like a trial by fire, but in front of an audience.

Estelle Parsons

#48. '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

#49. Cary Grant was wonderful to work with on stage. He would move downstage, so that as he looked at me the audience had to look at me, too. He knew a lot about the theater and how to move around. He was very secure.

Fay Wray

#50. I write for an audience that likes what I like, reads what I read, thinks about the things I think about. In many ways, this puts me in opposition to the people who go to the theater generally.

Eric Bogosian

#51. I can go to a movie theater and watch a movie I was in with an audience ... but with television, the opportunity to meet the fans at Comic Con or any other situation, it's a chance to enter that circle; it's that sharing.

Mark Sheppard

#52. For a lot of people, film is still the dream - the captive audience in the darkened theater - but I love TV. I think it's fantastic.

Jenji Kohan

#53. The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar.

David Wong

#54. Unfortunately, because the theater is always a poor relation when it comes to making the nut, it's not easy to get the audience in to see a play, unless you have a name that is recognizable, that the audience wants to see and is prepared to pay the $125 to see.

Angela Lansbury

#55. Yes, yes, theater in general is just going to always be my first love, performing for a live audience.

Megan Hilty

#56. I believe in things that move people, if the audience isn't deeply caught up and moved to either laughter or tears then I don't think it is theater.

Estelle Parsons

#57. At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.

Diane Paulus

#58. The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?

Adam Rapp

#59. 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

#60. I love the theater because the theater is alive. The audience is right there.

Chita Rivera

#61. The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.

Robert Brustein

#62. In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.

Karl Kraus

#63. We are being entertained all the time - in the bathroom, on the train, in our beds. Sure, there is a smaller audience for theater. But we know from radio that entertainment never goes away, it just changes. And more power to it.

Mike Nichols

#64. 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

#65. The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

Viola Spolin

#66. 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

#67. I see theater as a simple formula. Audience plus players plus story makes the play.

Christian Camargo

#68. I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me.

Stephen Sondheim

#69. I can stand at the back of the theater and watch an audience laugh, cry, and be moved by what I do. I can entertain people around the world. It's nice when you can give someone that gift.

Jerry Bruckheimer

#70. A good ending is vital to a picture, the single most important element, because it is what the audience takes with them out of the theater.

Walt Disney

#71. You have in Vegas the most heterogeneous audience you're gonna get anywhere in the country. In Boston, Chicago, Miami, you know who goes to the theater. In Vegas, you have people who only see one theater show a year, and it's in Vegas.

Penn Jillette

#72. I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

Ethan Hawke

#73. The shows at the Hilton are the most exciting shows I've ever done. The stage is huge, but the theater is intimate, so we can have a magnificent production and still connect with the audience.

Barry Manilow

#74. 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

#75. It's always been about when I do theater, the audience is just a viewer, not taking part in what's onstage. Whereas if you're doing stand-up, it's inclusive.

Jon Glaser

#76. Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience.

Patti LuPone

#77. I sure do love theater. I mean, that's where I started. I am actually sort of shy, but something happens when the audience comes in. It's something nice for me. It terrifies me, but I'm able to do it.

Annie Potts

#78. I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

David Zucker

#79. 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

#80. What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.

Cate Blanchett

#81. It's really an amazing feeling because you're flying in a car that's on stage and to be this age also, and in the theater and then with a huge audience of 1,800 people backing you up and cheering you on. It's a really amazing feeling.

Ellen Marlow

#82. L.A. is not a town that supports a lot of theater. Most of the shows don't get through a week or two and then, the audience kind of disappears.

Matthew Ashford

#83. We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.

Michael Bay

#84. Theater is like boxing - having the audience ringside. It's instant gratification. Or horrification.

Sylvester Stallone

#85. I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.

Shane Black

#86. Nowadays, especially in big commercial films it's much easier for the audience, and they tend to get spoonfed. It's much more interesting to me, people leave the theater and they start asking themselves questions and find their own moral compass about what these characters have been doing.

Michael Fassbender

#87. 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

#88. I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.

Julian Ovenden

#89. There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.

Ruth Ware

#90. And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.

Diablo Cody

#91. I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.

Sydney Pollack

#92. I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.

Steven Spielberg

#93. Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

Jeff Britting

#94. Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common: They are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause.

Julia Bacha

#95. All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater.

Shane Carruth

#96. When you play arenas you can create whatever you want. At a theater the height of the stage and the limitations of the theater can make you feel more separate from the audience.

Sade Adu

#97. ...the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.

Neal Gabler

#98. With theater, depending on the audience, the show is different every night and really requires your constant concentration. With film, it's more possible to focus for shorter, more intense bits of time.

Andre Holland

#99. Everybody has his own theater, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwrite, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.

Julius Charles Hare

#100. 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