Theatre Quotes | Page 9 | AACT

Theatre Quotes

Words to the Wise
Quotations from a wide range of theatrical perspectives

For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.

Displaying 321 - 360 of 421. Show 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | 60 results per page.
Category Quote Firstsort descending Last Source
Acting

Preparing a character is the opposite of building--it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

Peter Brook
Backstage

Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds.

Peter Hall
Acting, Directing

I think actors have a greater responsibility when doing comedy. It's as easy as anything to get cheap laughs, but that's not the idea at all. "The slight trip syndrome," we call it. With tragedy one can get away with things a bit more because audiences don't always know how to react.

Peter Bowles Richmond Magazine, April 2001
Playwriting

Playwrights must be allowed to be at less than their best sometimes, without meeting an all-out critical assault.

Peter Hall http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html
Acting

I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.

Peter O'Toole

http://home.att.net/~quotations/theatre.html

Costumes

Before a character even speaks, we 'read' their appearance through their costume.

Peter Ruthven Hall http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm
Set Design

Designers play with scale and proportion, making the ordinary extraordinary by taking an object out of context and changing its scale in relation to the characters' size and appearance.

Peter Ruthven Hall http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm
Set Design

Everything placed in the performance space, with the characters, creates a context for their story.
What is the shape of the space?
How do the shapes and colours within the space relate to the characters?
How do they 'frame' them?
What comments do the frames make about the characters and their worlds?

Peter Ruthven Hall http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/events.htm
General, Management

The artistic director gratifies his special need to relate to people in a highly accentuated paternalistic and maternalistic fashion.

Philip Weissman The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Set Design

My process is that I will read the play a couple of times and then not do anything until I've spoken with the director, because, of course, there are 500 different ways a play can look--and still honor every word that's in those stage directions. I don't want to think about how it works until I know what the director is interested in, and if the playwright is around, what they're thinking about as they've written it. Then I go away and do my research.

Rachel Hauck Interview with the set designer in Stage Directions magazine, August 2019
Acting

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

Ralph Richardson The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

Ralph Richardson http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting
Acting, Shakespeare

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

Ralph Fiennes http://www.ifc.com/fix/2011/12/ralph-fiennes-coriolanus-interview
Acting

When you're doing a play and you're afraid of a scene, that's the scene you should embrace, because that's the scene that will tell you something about the play.

Raul Esparza NY Times, 11/26/06
Acting, Diversity & Inclusion, Shakespeare

In a backstage interview during “The Taming of the Shrew,” Julia exclaims, “Some people think the only way to do Shakespeare is to do it like the British do it, because the British have the answer to Shakespeare! So I would imitate all the British.” He launches into a plummy version of “Othello,” and continues, “But then afterward I started realizing that I didn’t have to do it like that. I could bring myself to it. I could bring my own culture, my own Puerto Rican background, my own Spanish culture, my own rhythms.” Shakespeare benefitted from what Julia brought to his verse, which the actress Rita Moreno describes as salero. “It just means he was spicy,” she says, in the documentary. “And sexy, and tall!”

Raul Julia New Yorker article by Michael Schulman, September 13, 2019
General, Musical Theatre

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 Musical Stages
Playwriting

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan http://www.brainyquote.com/
Playwriting

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation.

Ring Lardner The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Backstage, Lighting, Set Design

If I wanted to have people tell me what to do, I would have become an actor.

Rob Hudd http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html
Acting

If you achieve success, you will get applause. Enjoy it--but never quite believe it.

Robert Montgomery Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
Acting

It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor, however, it is absolutely essential.

Robert Morley Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur
General

Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.

Robert Brustein http://izquotes.com/
General

The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.

Robert Holman http://izquotes.com/
General

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

Robert Brustein
Acting

It is widely acknowledged to be the toughest job to get any two acting teachers to agree about anything.

Robert Lewis The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Costumes, Lighting, Set Design

The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming, lighting, is to enhance the natural powers of the actor.

Robert Edmond Jones The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Set Design

There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead.

Robert Edmond Jones The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
General

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 The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price. I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality.

Robert De Niro
Acting

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Robert Redford
General

The arts are at the very center of community development in this time of change...change for the better. The frontier and all that it once meant in economic development and in the sheer necessity of building a nation is being replaced by the frontier of the arts. In no other way can Americans so well express the core and blood of their democracy; for in the communities lies the final text of the acceptance of the arts as a necessity of everyday life. In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone. They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theater. As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and the places where the people live. The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves.

Robert Gard
Playwriting

The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.

Robert Anderson Theatre Arts Mar 58
Management

A statement of vision is the overarching purpose, the big dream, the visionary concept--something presently out of reach--so stated that it excites the imagination and chlalenges people to work for something they do not yet know how to do.

Robert Greenleaf Servant Leadership
Shakespeare

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Robert Graves Robert Graves (1895 - 1985)
General

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

Robertson Davies

http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/theatrical/

General

Theatre is like a virus: once you get it you can't get rid of it.

Robin Boisseau http://www.hamptonu.edu/academics/schools/libarts/fparts/facultyandstaff.htm
Playwriting

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Rod Serling http://www.brainyquote.com
General

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 http://www.wisdomportal.com/Quotes
Acting

I learned acting by doing it. And although I had never taken an acting class, it didn't take long to learn how to be on the stage. All you have to do is to be humiliated in front of an audience a few times. If you don't like being humiliated publicly, you learn how to act.

Ron Vawter The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips
Acting

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

Rosalind Russell The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips

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