Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First |
Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Playwriting |
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick. |
Moss | Hart | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| General |
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own. |
Moss | Hart | |
| Acting, General |
God comes to us in theater [in] the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. |
Julie | Harris | Christian Science Monitor 15 May 79 |
| General, Playwriting |
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts. |
David | Hare | |
| Acting |
Good actors are good because of the things they can tell us without talking. When they are talking they are the slaves of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor. |
Cedric | Hardwicke | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| Musical Theatre |
I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it. |
Oscar | Hammerstein | |
| General |
The number of people who will not go to a show they do not want to see is unlimited. |
Oscar | Hammerstein | |
| Acting, Shakespeare |
Has anyone understood that the basic thing about Elizabethan theatre is that it was played in daylight? The actor saw the eyes of the audience. |
Peter | Hall | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
| 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 |
