I like to originate new roles and characters for musical theater.
Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It’s exciting when you hit on a new way.
I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.
I’ve always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that’s where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you’re around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.
The theater is magical and addictive.
I’m an actor, coming from New York theater.
My girlfriend’s a costume designer in the theater.
Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don’t relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater; you stay in control through the very end.
I long to get back into theater.
I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.
I was inspecting eyeglass lenses for a while. And I worked as a concession girl in a movie theater. And I was ironing before that. I always had some kind of a job. And then I started modeling.
We should have done more damage to the Iraqi forces before they withdrew from the Kuwaiti theater.
I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.
When I moved to New York City in 1965, I wanted to be in theater. I was following my Ethel Barrymore dream. But I was too young to be Ethel.
I worked a lot in Chicago’s theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater.
I think I’ll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.
Theater actors like to change character roles. They don’t like to always do the same thing.
No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.
I want to read books and go for walks and make dinner. I guess there are people who love working and that’s great. I’m not one of them. I love tackling roles and I love theater, but filming, I don’t get it. It seems mind-numbing to me.
When you’re an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.
I didn’t think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.
I’ve always had a foot in everything. As a kid, I was active in sports and theater. Now, I’m learning I have to focus a bit. I’m trying to get to next projects, like writing a screenplay. Once that comes together, I could put my mind to another book – maybe a fun kids’ book.
Processionalism is primary – how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That’s worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I’m a ‘straight-in’ man myself; I’m too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I’m going.
I moved to New York to be a theater actor. It’s what I studied and what I thought I wanted to do forever, as you do when you’re 18 and think you know exactly what you want. I was lucky enough to start working right away.
I was pursuing the arts with theater in school, and I was doing after-school activities, but not in any real movement towards a professional career.
Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don’t.
I couldn’t believe it! I mean, I’d always dreamed of acting on the screen – my previous background was all theater – but I wasn’t sure if the opportunity would ever present itself. Not only was this acting for the screen, this was acting in ‘The Hunger Games!’ I knew that I had to give this audition my all.
I’m doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It’s called ‘Race,’ and it’s very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they’re all navigating their personal views around race.
The Smith Center is a theater where you want to keep the lights on. The acoustics are amazing, and this is a stage that was built for sound.
It has been my experience that work on the screen clarifies stage portrayals and vice versa. You learn to make your face express more in making movies, and in working for the theater you have a sense of greater freedom.
I went to school for singing, middle school at LaGuardia High School. Followed by Berkeley College of Music and afterwards I went to acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse for Theater.
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
I’m doing a play, a musical. The musical follows the Mamma Mia concept. It’s my first LA theater project.
Cary Grant was wonderful to work with on stage. He would move downstage, so that as he looked at me the audience had to look at me, too. He knew a lot about the theater and how to move around. He was very secure.
If you can sell that you’re the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you’re a starship captain or a time traveler.
I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.
So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.
There’s such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don’t get in theater.
The only thing I haven’t done as an actor, other than Thai puppet theater somewhere, is act on a Broadway stage.
Well I’m not much of a singer. But it’s been a really nice time to do film, television, theater and have it all happening at once. That wasn’t planned but it just happens.
I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground.
I’m afraid to do theater now.
Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don’t train – at all really – for film acting. It’s mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.
I sing in many different colors and, hopefully, they add up to a great performance that, after you leave the theater, makes you feel like I’ve really shared something of myself.
I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren’t hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they’re excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.
Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.
When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I’d discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.
I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling – a vocation.
Theater for me at one point was a lifestyle, too.
The ’80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn’t integrate their film and theater departments – so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn’t talk to the actors.
I learned how to turn it on and turn it off. You learn that in theater, too, but for film work, I learned from doing ‘Henry,’ I learned how to leave work at work and go home. There’s always spillover. Actors speak of this.
You know, I love plays. I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director.
I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see – you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location.
To me, theater is the mecca; if you really love to act, that’s where it’s the most fun, by a long shot.
As a kid, I had a background in theater.
To me, a theater is a kind of a sacred space. It needs a kind of ceremony, like what happens when you consecrate a church.
I’m terrified of being too famous. What I’m really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it’s me, that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.
