The Theater Is Quotes

#1. Theater isn't there to provide answers. Only possibilities. I just ask the questions. But I believe hope comes from the fact that there is a potential for redemption. At the core, that's what matters in the theater I'm attracted to. Do we dare to hope? Do we allow ourselves to hope?

Joe Mantello

#2. No, the horror genre is not my first love. I don't run to the theater to see horror films.

Amanda Righetti

#3. The theater is a kind of international language, and I like it. But I have a practical bent of mind, too. In any other field, I could make only about a tenth as much as I do acting. That's why I want to be a producer. It pays better, and you have more control.

Carolyn Jones

#4. All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.

Stephen Davis

#5. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.

A.R. Rahman

#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. 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

#8. I auditioned equally for film and theater. The difference is that theater has seasons, while film, it's always happening.

Elizabeth Olsen

#9. The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

Germaine Greer

#10. I'm not photographing the model in the classic sense; the model is playing a part in my photographs. It's more like theater. I always work with models I know, and I let them participate in deciding how to act their part.

Kim Weston

#11. In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

Tim Crouch

#12. The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives

Barack Obama

#13. I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.

Chad Lowe

#14. 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

#15. I don't see many people with longevity anymore. Everything was harder when I started, and you had to take acting lessons, do theater parts, work on connections and then get lucky. The technology is good, but it's also a hindrance for longevity.

Dustin Diamond

#16. I grew up in the theater, my mother is an actress, I was always around the world of acting and theater.

Alicia Keys

#17. Acting is what I love to do.I understand the differences between the different formats. But I enjoy whether it be film, TV or in the theater.

Carter Jenkins

#18. Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#19. It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now - my good Lord - look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.

Paul Newman

#20. What's missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.

Harold Prince

#21. 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

#22. The Old Vic is a beautiful theater to work in. It's quite a large house, but it has a feeling of intimacy.

Jennifer Ehle

#23. 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

#24. In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

Tracy Letts

#25. And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.

Jacques Rivette

#26. I come from the theater, where the response to your work is immediate, and I suppose there's a part of me that still craves that.

Bryan Cogman

#27. I think anybody who has been in the theater, prefers it. Television is a ... factory. You turn out things on a revolving assembly line. You don't have time to perfect anything in television.

Gale Gordon

#28. A new star has been born and Vera's performance brings alive the desolate life of O'Neil's young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.

Rajiv Kapoor

#29. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.

Pablo Casals

#30. The joy of my career is I've been very blessed to be able to be an actor in major films, television, theater, and also British radio. In fact, my dream as an actor when I started out was to be able to work in all the media. Thankfully, that's what I'm being given to do.

David Suchet

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. If theater is ritual, then dance is too ... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.

Paulo Coelho

#34. Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.

Eddie Redmayne

#35. 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

#36. People pay all that money to sit in a chair in the theater mainly because it is a respectable way to see and experience things they cannot see and experience in their own lives.

Elizabeth Ashley

#37. If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there's a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

George Lucas

#38. The movie theater is never going away. If that was a case why are there still restaurants? People still have kitchens in their home!

Michael Moore

#39. Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.

Simon McBurney

#40. The truth of the matter is, every film is imperfect. It's the nature of the beast. One of the things that people ask me all the time is, what's the difference between theater and film, and one of the biggest differences is, in the theater you always get another go.

Stephen Daldry

#41. The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre.

Moss Hart

#42. '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

#43. We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

Martin Scorsese

#44. The theater is reaching as many different demographics as it can now.

Neil Patrick Harris

#45. The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater.

Terry Teachout

#46. The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

James Lipton

#47. What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.

Robert Gottlieb

#48. I want people to leave the theater wrestling with the idea that our pain - physical, emotional, and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed, or "fixed."

Karyn Kusama

#49. 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

#50. If some people think it shows a feminine side to be in the theater, I've never felt that. And I'll openly say that an intelligent person who is a sensitive person will be and should be in touch with their inner female.

Anthony Warlow

#51. Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that's the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.

Alan Bradley

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater ... it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.

Kurt Weill

#56. In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.

Brian Cox

#57. The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.

Terry Teachout

#58. Doing the big budget films really makes you appreciate doing movies like Shelter. It's because this is like doing theater, you just have to hit the ground running

Paul Bettany

#59. Personal improvement is like sitting in a movie theater, arguing with the villain projected on the screen, and feeling that at least we have tried to make things better.

Steven Harrison

#60. Looking through the viewfinder for me is like being in a movie theater. That's what I like about it.

Lou Reed

#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. For movies, you need to come up with a movie that is only possible to screen in the theater, which legitimizes the way you watch them. You buy your ticket so you need to get something in exchange for that. It should be a spectacle.

Fedor Bondarchuk

#63. They want families to come to New York and go to the theater, so the theater is all geared toward family entertainment. It's money, you know.

Sandra Bernhard

#64. What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Edward Albee

#65. In the theater, everything is ephemeral. Everything is almost weightless and without a very clear definition of how you made it.

Rafael Vinoly

#66. Every night, you fight for that standing ovation at the end of the night. And if you do something wrong, the domino effect is chaotic. And you must not allow yourself to make mistakes whatsoever. So in that case, theater, it's fascinating because of the discipline that you need.

Ricky Martin

#67. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.

Garth Greenwell

#68. This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#69. I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.

Greta Gerwig

#70. 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

#71. I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater.

Mos Def

#72. 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

#73. There's only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the - it is in the General Motors headquarters complex.

Michael Moore

#74. One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.

Linda Cardellini

#75. 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

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

Julian Ovenden

#77. I'm so used to being in a theater where there is always a narrative, but I'm more about the still moment, the painter inside me.

Ragnar Kjartansson

#78. Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

Alan Jay Lerner

#79. I love the community of theater. There is something about the camaraderie: People who show up eight times a week to do a show. It's unlike any other business. It's just lovely. You feel like you're in a family.

Billy Porter

#80. Before shooting, I prepare with the actors much more like it's a theater play than a movie. Apparently, that way of working is very unusual.

Pedro Almodovar

#81. 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

#82. Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Al Lopez

#83. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Gore Vidal

#84. Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing.

Ravi Zacharias

#85. Full Frame is where I had the first showing of my first film, 'Street Fight.' I have a fond memory of pacing around outside the theater, nervously trying to keep from throwing up. It's a magical festival, well curated, with a warm and generous spirit.

Marshall Curry

#86. I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.

Bryce Dallas Howard

#87. To me, theater is a spiritual experience. Probably the reason I do theater is it, I guess, comes the closest to feeling like God, or to feeling a spiritual experience that people can have together.

Kate Arrington

#88. 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

#89. The theater should be free to the people just as the Public Library is free, just as the museum is free ... I want the theater to be made accessible to the people.

Eva Le Gallienne

#90. Theater in America is a kind of weed sprouting up in the weirdest places. It's deeply democratic and deeply human, and I think it's one of the best things our culture does.

Mac Wellman

#91. Physicality is the basis of performance.

David Petersen

#92. I believe education in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts ... is part of a well-rounded education and can provide so much joy, now and in the future.

Rudy Giuliani

#93. The vector equilibrium is the zero point for
happenings or nonhappenings: it is the empty
theater and empty circus and empty universe
ready to accommodate any act and any audience.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#94. More than anything, people want the reality of the discussion at hand. If what is going on in that building is the real thing, if the transforming love and power of Jesus Christ is being experienced, you can sit on a metal folding chair or in a plush theater seat.

Bill Hybels

#95. The big difference between TV and theater is that you get to do a new play every week, so it's quite challenging, but it keeps you fresh. There's never any fear of getting stale in your performance.

Kevin Chamberlin

#96. I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.

Omar Sharif

#97. Live theater to me is much more free than the movies or television.

Eartha Kitt

#98. 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

#99. The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.

Antonin Artaud

#100. A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's.

Hugh Jackman