Top 191 Rehearsal Quotes

For someone who works in theatre, the rehearsal is where you discover everything. It is where magic happens, where the script enters you and becomes part of you.

Just as a city cannot protect its manufacturing base without keeping its factories, we cannot have a strong arts sector without studios, rehearsal space, and performance venues.

A movie is a filmed rehearsal in a way. The audience doesn’t know that because you’re taking out the things that don’t work. There’s no comparison to the theater because it’s live. But making a movie is just as challenging and exciting, I find. A movie is pure process. The theater is the result of process.

The only time I’ve ever danced every day was during ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and in the two-week rehearsal for ‘Dirty Dancing,’ and that was only to do a particular dance.

I’m not one to dwell on rehearsal or preparation.

Any rehearsal process – I find, anyway – does have quite an effect on me, and I very much live in that world for the whole period of time that I’m involved with the production. But normally, afterwards with a little bit of space, I can come right back out of it again.

For singers and drummers, you’ve really gotta have your chops together just to do a rehearsal.

The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you’re going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theater because there are no second takes in front of a live audience.

There’s pre-production, and the second part is when you start rehearsal. Pre-production was a very large learning curve for me.

I don’t do rehearsal. Some directors prefer to do rehearsal – readings before the actual shooting – but I don’t like this process because I think there are certain things that are so spontaneous, and they cannot happen twice.

I want to have fun. Life ain’t no dress rehearsal. I want to have fun. I’m a comedian; I ain’t no politician. So everything I do is with humor, with love.

It’s been said that I formed The Wallflowers to hide my name but, really, I’ve always wanted to be in a band – right from the day my friends and I soundproofed a garage with bed-covers for our first rehearsal.

Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal – the vision, the structure, the architecture.

I mean four hours of rehearsal done, trying out for ‘The Sing-Off,’ and now winning is just a dream come true for all of us.

There’s nowhere to hide in the theatre. You can’t be the one in rehearsal who doesn’t know their lines.

There’s not one day that goes by that I’m not listening to one of my songs or in rehearsal for one of my songs or dancing to one of my songs.

The way that I write is I just write a ton of music in the background of my life, and then I just bring it into rehearsal. It’s, like, ‘Okay, guys. It goes like this. Let’s smooth it out.’

If Broadway shows charge preview prices while the cast is in dress rehearsal, why should restaurants charge full price when their dining room and kitchen staffs are still practicing?

Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they’ll let it loose and you go, ‘Ah that’s great.’

I don’t rehearse with my actors… the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on… Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that’s allowed… so you film reactions; you don’t create them.

I normally go through every single line as part of my warm-up before a show. When I’m working on a film or TV programme, there often isn’t a rehearsal, so I tend to learn my lines much later. They are often shorter, too, so they’re essentially just there.

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say ‘this is where I want to be… I want this look.

A pilot is like the most extensive dress rehearsal you can ever imagine, because the writers are learning about the actors, the actors are learning about the characters.

I believe all conscientious actors feel the same way – that there is too much hurry-scurry in TV to permit a sufficient amount of rehearsal time.

Frankly, seeing my plays with an audience is something I do with gritted teeth; I find the experience very difficult. I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one’s there; that’s kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.

We had no money, and we had to go through ‘punk’ school. We ended up living in the rehearsal room that used to be the Sex Pistols rehearsal room at Malcolm McLaren’s office. So we had this sort of interesting beginning.

My workout is ballet class and rehearsal – I’ve never belonged to a gym.

The key for me is really just to stay in a child-like state in the rehearsal studio. I’m really goofy and really silly and crazy. If I get too serious, I start hitting a wall.

Mirrors are part of my life and an ever-changing source of delight, displeasure or even disaster, depending on which one I am looking in. I look in a magnifying mirror when I pluck my eyebrows in the morning, full-length mirrors every day in rehearsal, and I often nervously bring out a compact to check my make-up.

My preference is for people who come to rehearsal and get into the ring. I like a muscular actor who’s playful.

I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time – particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart – rediscover them – and you must.

I love opening night, and I love doing plays. But one of my favorite parts about doing a play or working on a new play is rehearsal.

That’s all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction – I don’t think anyone could know how much it really means.

I have directed good actors and have gone through the process which is more detailed in theater in a way. You have to get people to stay for two or three hours in a performance. They need more talk and rehearsal than in films.

The rehearsal is where it all happens for an actor.

I did this thing for HBO called ‘Strip Search’ with Sidney Lumet, who was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. We actually had a rehearsal period before we shot, which is unusual.

It is hard to get good actors who also do television, ads and films. Theatre requires six weeks of rehearsal for a play.

I truly thought I was going to be in pop music. And then I joined a choir to meet girls, and everything changed in the first rehearsal.

I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.

You have to run, an awful lot, on instinct. Even on ‘Veep,’ it’s not like you get weeks of rehearsal to break out what’s going on in the scenes.

The tech rehearsal for Brits is so different. They have little glasses of wine and walk around saying, ‘Lovely, darling, lovely.’

I gather from a lawyer that there was a rehearsal yesterday. We haven’t a hope. I know the presiding judge too: I’ve had the misfortune to sleep with his wife. He was specially picked.

Working on ‘Open All Hours’ had some unexpected perks, not least the attractions of the canteen at the BBC’s rehearsal studios in West London.

On a TV show, for instance, dancers have to be paid for a week and a half rehearsal time. So unless they’re vital to a production, they’re just not used.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don’t want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it’s a purely empirical art form. It’s all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

I feel that once you go into rehearsal, you need to focus on the show in the room.

I think about how best to live my grandmother’s twin mantras that ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’ and ‘Life is not about what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.’

In ’57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door.

I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that.

Then, in 2000, John Reid, Elton John’s former manager, asked me to audition for the stage version of The Graduate he was producing. So I worked on it, got the part, and after three weeks’ rehearsal I was on stage!

When she started crying in my rehearsal, I felt so badly because I was like, ‘I’m making Kelly Clarkson cry right now,’ but it also felt really good because I thought, ‘If she is feeling this, hopefully, America will feel this, too.’

I love that feeling. I guess I love escaping my life, really. I love going into another world and feeling for this amount of time that this is it, this is the world I’m going to live in. You feel it more during the rehearsal process.