Theater Quotes

I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

I made theater very important in the beginning of my career.

Repertory theater is all about being part of the whole, one of the many colors in this vast palette.

The big advantage to playing the Venetian in Las Vegas - where it's a beautiful theater - is that unlike other places, even many other nice venues, I can do a set and lighting cues, I can put on a real show. I can dress up, wear a tux.

Unfortunately I put the opening date on the 5th of December 1941 and on the 7th of December the Japanese bombarded Pearl Harbour. My dream of a theater in Washington D.C. came to a prompt end.

It's really hard to say how long the show will last and will continue. I hope it lasts for a very long time. As long as kids watch it, anyway. But beyond this, sure, I would love to be doing film. I'd love to be doing more theater and perhaps even writing.

I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City.

I'm preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that's coming up in New York City.

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.

I wouldn't say anything I ever did in film would be something I'd use the word proud about. I've done better work in the theater.

Today's restaurant is theater on a grand scale.

I had no training in the theater. I did not study it but just did it.

I'd love to do some theater.

Memorial bracelets memorializing prisoners of war, missing in action, killed in action, and those who died of wounds or injuries sustained in a combat theater are authorized.

When I'm shooting a movie, I'm always in an invisible theater seat. I respect the fact that people have worked hard all week and want to go to the movies on the weekend and be entertained.

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.

When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

Getting work in theater has always been sort of cyclical.

Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.

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.

I'm a kid who did stock and summer youth theater where we'd put up two shows and you had no rehearsal. I've also understudied, where I've had to go on with no rehearsal.

I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth.

With acting, it was really more of a general kind of experience of really just loving being in the theater.

I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

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.