I did great things in the theater. I did some nice roles, ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ or ‘La Vie en Rose.’ And I love my role in ‘Frantic.’
When I was 14 or 15, I was a really good volleyball player, so I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just get a scholarship to an Ivy League school through volleyball.’ Then I quit when I decided to focus on theater.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
I got tackled once in a movie theater. I was with my mom and brother, and then suddenly I got hit from behind and sort of sprawled out on the candy counter.
My brain knows how to learn musical theater dancing, but learning hip-hop? It was so hard for my body to understand how to move in that way.
Movies, you can insulate yourself more from audience, to a degree, and just look at box office. In theater, the audience is a very dynamic part of your process, and you feel much more exposed.
I’ve done some TV and I’ve done a lot of theater, obviously, and the last character I played on Broadway was a very fast-talking broad. I’m used to learning material and words.
I watch a lot of movies. I’ve watched movies since I was a kid. My dad brought me to the theater once a week. Always – it was a must. So I think that influenced me a lot to be an actor.
I used to do a lot of fencing in the theater and a lot of horse riding in the early days, so I’m used to it in a way. If you’re classically trained like I am, it’s a little bit like mother’s milk to me. I enjoy it.
I attended theater camps and classes growing up, but there was never any talk of me making a life out of acting. My parents were much too practical and grounded for that.
We go to the theater to be entertained, but if what is left after you watch the movie is a sort of eye-opening perspective on some social issues, then it can be a really powerful piece of art.
I think movies are a director’s medium in the end. Theater is the actor’s medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.
For me, it’s all I’ve wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.
When I was a kid, I used to sneak down the stairs when my folks were listening to ‘The Witch’s Tale’ and ‘Inner Sanctum’ on the radio. I went to see ‘Frankenstein’ in the movie theater and got the pants scared off of me.
In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people.
I happen to love working in cinema, but the theater is always there… you know, and I would never shut the door on it. Even though it’s been quite a bit of time since I’ve done a play, last one was in New York.
I have a passion to do theater.
I’m not photographing the model in the classic sense; the model is playing a part in my photographs. It’s more like theater. I always work with models I know, and I let them participate in deciding how to act their part.
Theater is the most enriching and thrilling thing to do as an actor.
I have, indeed, lived most of my life overseas, but I’ve returned repeatedly to work in film, special television productions, and the New York theater. There have also been tributes and similar occasions that have called me back to Hollywood. I’ve returned so often, I almost feel that I’ve never left.
I directed a piece of theater in Italy. We took nine fables from the town and we created a play.
It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
When I started off as an actress, I did at a play at the Taper Too Theatre here in Los Angeles, called ‘In The Abyss Of Coney Island.’ That was more of a dramatic play. It was a small theater house. This was the first time I was literally on the road, doing a play, for four months.
I want to make movies that people talk about when they leave the theater, that aren’t clear-cut, but effective and fulfilling in some sense.
I did get a degree in theater and took some voice-over classes.
I don’t think I ever really got interested in theater.
Reality really is theater. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s all so nonsensical, ridiculous and chaotic.
I always ended up having the funny part in Shakespeare, but I really thought I’d be doing theater. That was my ambition for myself.
The award is important in order to bring people to the movie theater. That’s the only principle meaning of any award.
The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.
Well, ever since I was little, I knew that singing was what I wanted to do, and then I got into, you know, doing drama club and community theater.
I had a teacher senior year in high school. He was a theater teacher, and he basically was a little bit like ‘High School Musical.’ He kind of encouraged the jocks to get involved with the plays. I did it as kind of a senior year lark.
I grew up in Queens and New Jersey. I started doing children’s theater when I was seven to get out of school because I didn’t fit in.
But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.
I’ve always loved film more than theater.
One of my favorite things to do, when the ghost light is on and it’s just an empty stage – I’ll let my shadow spread right across the theater, and I just say to myself, ‘For the next few hours, these folks are my responsibility. I get to share in something that is unique.’ It’s like church.
When I moved to New York, I didn’t know how much improv and comedy would play into my life. I thought I was going to do theater and Broadway and stuff.
I prefer film to TV because of the amount of time film affords you that TV doesn’t (though theater is probably my favorite and the scariest place of all).
I’m always trying to convince myself there’s something important about what I do. But some peoples’ lives are really altered by a night at the theater.
Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You’ll be an old man before you know it.
Theater is a space where you cross over from everyday life, because there are real people in that moment moving in front of you – you’re being invited to believe in a story and cross that bridge.
I like the theater enormously, but I truly love films – the whole bizarre, boring process that it can be.
Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.
I’d love to do some theater.
In ’75, the year both A Chorus Line and Chicago hit Broadway, my head spun around and I became the ultimate theater queen for life.
A lot of the shows that really become hit shows are often demonstrated, like Mystery Science Theater.
I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can’t do it. They don’t have the chops.
I studied acting at Boston University. I was in the theater department there. Somewhere in there I decided that wasn’t what I was going to do and I went to the B.F.A. film program at N.Y.U.
The tradition of the South is not urban… I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.
I started playing the drums at five years old and used to listen to a lot of screamo bands like Asking Alexandria, Dream Theater, and Attack Attack!
Theater will cast in a more open way; Denzel Washington might play Richard III. Television and film don’t really cast openly like that. The theater world has always been a leader in diversity.
I majored in theater, so I’d love to get back on a stage.
I’m preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that’s coming up in New York City.
As filmmakers, we can show where a person’s mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.
My main concern is theater, and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish, and it has to do better.
I did a play called ‘On Golden Pond’ in a dinner theater in Maine and then went to New York for a talent competition having put together a three-man juggling routine and some one-liners and I got myself an agent from that.
