When I owned the theater, I had the Glen Miller Orchestra. I had 20 girls singing and dancing. I had a cast of characters. It was a big group production, as well as ushers, ticket takers.
Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said ‘you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.’ I created the program, went to college and graduate school and now here I am.
When I was in ‘Kinky Boots,’ nobody really cared what shape I was in, and so I remember, like, fans would send me cookies to the theater, and I would be like, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll have another cookie!’
What I don’t have in theater is editing.
And so I’ve always been fascinated by the technical end of theater, and a lot of my closest friends are not actors, but in the other end of the business.
If you want to see theater you go to New York.
For me, it was a lot of hard work doing theater eight nights a week around the country, going from job to job.
I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.
I love making people laugh. It’s an addiction and it’s probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there’s no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.
When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God’s gift to the theater.
I was inspired to become an actor from theater I’d seen, so I assumed I’d do a lot of theater. But when I left Guidhall, the first thing I did was a short film – I played the main character. And I loved it. I love working on camera. I love the smallness of it and the detail and the routine of it.
I tried softball and soccer. I just didn’t take as much of a liking to it as I did sitting in a movie theater and watching people recreate a story, and doing it myself, as well.
The trick is to have my own particular taste and feel for the theater to audiences who have been used to one particular style and taste for nearly 40 years.
People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling – a vocation.
I started out really into musical theater. So you can imagine I was super popular. I wasn’t awkward looking at all.
I worked in television; I’m the Failed Pilot Queen, I’ve done so many television shows, pilots, theater … when you do it for so long, I’m telling you, you get to the point where it becomes varied because you take what’s available for a number of reasons. It’s just an occupational hazard.
Growing up in Canada, none of my family were performers or anything like that, but I was terrible at hockey, so they needed something for me to do on Saturdays for me to get out of the house. I signed up for theater school on Saturdays, and I’d go for four-and-a-half hours every Saturday morning and learn about theater.
When I entered college, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. My advisor happened to be from the theater department, and he encouraged me to take some classes there, which I did.
You know, ‘Mad Max’ and ‘The Road Warrior’ was part of my childhood, and that’s why I’m so close to it. I remember seeing those movies at a drive-in theater with my parents when I was very young.
I don’t want the kind of theater that I love and grew up seeing to die out.
Theater is just so much more satisfying than film or television just because you deliver the whole thing from start to finish in one evening, and you can tell if people have enjoyed it or not. That’s great to do every night to go in front of a full room of people and tell the story. There’s nothing like that really.
When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.
I want to do theater and I am looking forward to doing more Television and Movies. I also want to direct some plays in theater workshops for people with disabilities.
And I started as a journalism major at Ohio State, ended up in theater and I love to read.
I’m such a theater geek.
Now I’m back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.
I’m trying to bring a new generation into the musical theater and to create a new audience.
There’s such a thing as theater discipline. One player doesn’t appropriate another’s inventions.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
Thank God for the theater.
When I go to the movie theater, I want to get emotion from the actors in the movie.
My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I’ve always grown up around theater.
I wouldn’t say anything I ever did in film would be something I’d use the word proud about. I’ve done better work in the theater.
Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I’ve made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time – they are my audience. They’re the people that I think about while I’m writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.
Give me an 18-hour day on set or in the theater, and I will be the happiest person alive.
The adrenaline of a live performance is unlike anything in film or theater. I can see why it’s so addictive.
The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.
Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.
The theater is the thing I love doing most.
‘The Master,’ it was really important to me to go see that in the theater, but that’s a very rare occurrence for me. I typically enjoy things on my laptop. I’m in bed; I can be able to pause them.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.
Miramax can buy a small independent movie that isn’t very good, but because it has great relationships with different theaters, it can get into a big theater.
The truth of the matter is, every film is imperfect. It’s the nature of the beast. One of the things that people ask me all the time is, what’s the difference between theater and film, and one of the biggest differences is, in the theater you always get another go.
I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.
Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.
I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else – problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.
I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t graduate college with an acting degree or a theater degree. I didn’t have the traditional route of training.
Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.
When you go to the movie theater and the opening of this movie and you see the kids just cracking up with a character you are giving your voice to, you get goose bumps. It’s so beautiful.
I love the theater, but if I had to choose, I would choose a film at this time in my life. Something meaty, to sink my teeth into.
There’s a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater… Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.
I’ve always wanted to do theater in Chicago. Chicago is a big theater town-and, in some ways, I think this city is savvier and smarter than New York. Sometimes, I think it’s a little too chic to go to theater in New York these days.
I grew up in the theater and danced ballet atrociously.
When I came to know theater, drama became valuable to me.
I always say film is art, theater is life and television is furniture.
To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.
By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.
The shows at the Hilton are the most exciting shows I’ve ever done. The stage is huge, but the theater is intimate, so we can have a magnificent production and still connect with the audience.
The feature space is a spectacle space. It’s about getting people out of their houses to go to theater when we all have a lot of things in our home now that occupy our attention.
