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Theatre Quotes
Theatre Quotes
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- " Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism."
- Alan Jay Lerner
Source: http://www.worldofquotes.com
- " When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting."
- Steve Buscemi
- " The theatre has built a whole art round the actor, based on the man and his double - the actor and his character."
- Jean-Louis Barrault
- " An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow."
- Lawrence Barrett
- " Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretive one."
- Paul Newman
- " You need three things in the theatre -- the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something."
- Kenneth Haigh
- " In my plays I want to look at life -- at the commonplace of existence -- as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."
- Christopher Fry
- " The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."
- Arthur Miller
- " I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds."
- Wallace Shawn
- " If no single reason can fully account for the lack of great work on Broadway these days, there is a factor in the discussion that is rarely mentioned but which has a bearing on what gets produced: the audience. . . It's not audience intelligence that has waned; it's audience passion -- the pro forma Broadway standing ovation now springs from duty not desire. . . If that passion exists more in the audience for The Lord of the Rings than for contemporary Broadway musicals, well, at least it is alive somewhere."
- Brendan Lemon
- " The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art."
- Roman Rolland
- " My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive."
- Gwyneth Paltrow
Source: http://www.worldofquotes.com
- " A flop is often the result of the fact that each of the talents involved, while working on the same project, may in effect have been working on a different show from all the others. If all contributors do not share the same vision of the evening, the end product will not evince the harmony of diverse elements--the seeming inevitability of book, score, and staging--of a good musical."
- Ethan Mordden
Source: Not Since Carrie
- " There is a traditional trick that theatre people have played as long as I can remember. A veteran member of a company will order a gullible newcomer to find the key to the curtain. Naturally, the joke is there is no such thing. I have been in the theatre over fifty years, and I don't think anyone would consider me naive, but all my life I've been searching for that key. And I'm still looking. . . ."
- Richard Rodgers
Source: Musical Stages
- " A nonprofessional theatre is, simply, one comprised of people who do not derive their income from it and do not spend most of their time engaged in it. There are two distinct categories: (1) nonprofessional groups that present plays with some regularity; and (2) nonprofessional groups that are organized on a one-time basis to present a play or a show for some special purpose. The former represents what is known as community theatre, and the latter falls under the heading of amateur theatre (though both types are amateur, or nonprofessional)."
- Stephen Langley
Source: Theatre Management & Production in America
- " This is a non-commercial theatre. It's got to be run by a person who sees right from the start that the profits won't be money profits. [On the idea of a Federal Theatre Project, 1934]"
- Harry Hopkins
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " This is an extremely foolish and stupid and idiotic kind of attitude--to expect theatres to make money. Do the public schools make money? Do libraries make money? Does the zoo make money? Do the sewers make money? It's a community service."
- John Hirsch
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " How do you teach someone that a theatre comes about first as an idea, from an individual who has a philosophy and a passion? That a theatre's idea is its heart and individual soul? That the person who creates it must have the desire not only to create work, but also to create the conditions in which that work can live--and in which others can do it as well? How do you teach someone to want to be a midwife as well as a mother."
- Robert Kalfin
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " Someone once said that being an artistic director is the intelligent exercise of one's own taste. And that is what I believe with all my heart and soul. If you start second-guessing yourself in advance, I think you're done for."
- Andre Bishop
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
- " The artistic director gratifies his special need to relate to people in a highly accentuated paternalistic and maternalistic fashion."
- Philip Weissman
Source: The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips