You can’t lie to your audience. You can’t lie to your fans.
I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn’t necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn’t ever really seen before.
If you are ever on stage, and it feels as though the audience is not laughing at the right points or are not quite as engaged as you’d hope, you have to remember there is always somebody who might be falling in love with this world and having an epiphany. I was that person.
Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.
I stand on stage hoping to give good energy to the audience, but if I cannot give good energy anymore, I will have to leave right away.
I was afraid no one would laugh, and I wanted to pretend I wasn’t noticing the audience. I didn’t want the audience to get the idea I was telling a joke and waiting for a laugh.
I love being in a small club where everybody has a good seat, and we don’t look like ants. And you can feel the audience, which makes it kind of magical, and I miss that. I guess I have the best of both worlds.
I’ve discovered that Motown and Broadway have a lot in common – a family of wonderfully talented, passionate, hardworking young people, fiercely competitive but also full of love and appreciation for the work, for each other and for the people in the audience.
The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience’s eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience ‘right now.’
I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between the jokes you can tell your friends but you can’t tell to an audience. There’s a fine line you have to tread because you don’t know who is out there in the auditorium. A lot of people are too easily offended.
Personally when I listen to a script, I think from the audience’s point of view. I would ask myself whether they would like to see me in this role?
I love talking to the audience, and I must be the luckiest performer in the world. I always land something or somebody that just takes off.
I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.
I have a genuine love affair with my audience. When I’m on stage they’re not privileged to see me. It’s a privilege for me to see them.
You know that genie where you get three wishes? One that has never changed for me is I would like to sing, and move an audience through song.
Everything that I do is very autobiographical. I’m trying to be as much of an open book as possible and give the audience every single piece of me.
It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.
I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you’re starting out in comedy, it’s the audience that tells you what’s funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.
I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
I worked a lot on ‘Conan’ as an actor, and when I moved to New York, a lot of my friends were on the first staff of that show. I started doing bit parts, which was the first thing I’d done on camera in front of a live audience.
Love is the root of everything. Whatever you do you must do with love so I also sing with love and perform with love for the love of my audience.
Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.
When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.
At least in my performances, the audience has become so diverse in a way that I don’t think ballet has ever experienced.
I left school and couldn’t find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I’ve always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
I’ve passed on a lot of huge-money jobs. Money doesn’t enter into the decision-making. If I do a big blockbuster, it’s about how big an audience you’ll get and where you can take them.
Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.
It’s more interesting for me as an audience member to see a movie about a loser.
There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning, and there is nothing to match that.
Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Confronting a stadium audience, you can’t see the whites of their eyes. It’s just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can’t see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.
The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you’re not, you start to question if maybe there’s something wrong with you for not getting it.
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
When I began acting, my biggest fear was whether the audience will appreciate the kind of films I do.
I take it extremely seriously to do absolutely the best work possible and the truest work possible, because I feel like that is what’s going to resonate not only for myself but hopefully for an audience.
As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
Never underestimate the intelligence of the audience; make good programmes, and they will come.
I make films to explore concepts and raise questions, not tell the audience what to think.
It is not whether you really cry. It’s whether the audience thinks you are crying.
If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It’s the ultimate hustle.
I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.
As a filmmaker, the most dramatic and the most dread-inspiring thing is when the audience can see more than the characters themselves can see.
Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
Keeping it clean is important to me because I’m just aware of my audience. My audience is a younger generation and, just in general, I wouldn’t want to show my mom a video of me swearing like crazy. It’s good clean fun.
I run a meme type of account on Twitter; I know what my audience is looking for.
If your audience is young, it’d be youth culture, if your audience is older, it’d be older people, if it were senior citizens, it’d be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.
Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well!
I want to give the audience the whole package, and for me, the whole package is to give them something fresh as well. It’s not as much fun resting on your laurels.
A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.
The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I’m not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I’m certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.
I can get an audience screaming in Las Vegas and say, ‘Barbara, that was a great show,’ and she’ll say, ‘Would you please hurry up? We have dinner reservations at 9:30.’
