Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting, Directing |
You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence. |
Thelonious | Monk | The Quotable Musician, from Bach to Tupac, by Sheila E. Anderson (Allworth Press) |
Acting |
I still suffer terribly from stage fright. I get sick with fear. Not every night, but at the beginning and on occasion - not necessarily when I'm expecting it. You just have to cope with it - take it on the chin and work through it, trying to use the adrenalin to perform. keyword=stagefright |
Helen | Mirren | Brainyquote.com |
Musical Theatre, Playwriting |
Musicals were never not cool to me. |
Lin-Manuel | Miranda | Financial Times, 2022 |
General, Playwriting |
The past isn't done with us. Ever, ever, ever, |
Lin-Manuel | Miranda | NPR's "Fresh Air," June 29, 2020 |
Playwriting |
By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings. |
Arthur | Miller | http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller |
Playwriting |
A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great. |
Arthur | Miller | |
Acting |
The "magic if" is a tool invented by Stanislavski, the father of acting craft, is to help an actor make appropriate choices. Essentially, the "magic if" refers to the answer to the question, "What would I do if I were this character in this situation?" Note that the question is not "What would I do if I were in this situation?" What you would do may be very different from what the character would do. Your job, based on your analysis of the script, the scene, and the given circumstances regarding the who of your character, is to decide what he or she would do. |
Bruce | Miller | Acting on the Script (2014) |
Playwriting |
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. |
Arthur | Miller | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
Acting |
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man. |
Sanford | Meisner | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Playwriting |
No one makes you write plays; the world could sort of get along without me turning out a play every year, so I do this because I enjoy it enormously. It gives me great pleasure, and working in the theatre is, I think its own reward. |
Terrence | McNally | |
Lighting |
Lighting paperwork is a living thing, continually evolving throughout the production process until opening night. |
Anne E. | McMills | The Assistant Light Designer's Toolkit |
Acting |
In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience. |
Ian | McKellen | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
The Civic Theater idea, as a distinctive issue, implies the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of the arts of the theater, participation by the people in these arts not mere spectatorship, a new resulting technique, leadership by means of a permanent staff of artists (not of merchants in art), elimination of private profit by endowment and public support, dedication in the service to the whole community: these are chief among its essentials, and these imply a new and nobler scope for the art of the theater itself. [1912] |
Percy | McKaye | |
Directing |
If you cast wrong, you are in a lot of trouble. |
Paul | Mazursky | Friendly Advice (book) |
General |
I didn't like the play. But I saw it under unfavorable circumstances -- the curtains were up. |
Groucho | Marx | http://www.ag.wastholm.net/category/art |
Costumes |
Next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business. [Birdie, in All About Eve] |
Joseph | Mankiewicz | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |