In theater and dance, I was trying to win someone’s approval, trying to get in, trying to be good. It felt out of my control, whereas music suddenly felt like this free expression. It was fun.
Dream Theater music, there’s a lot of background and context to the songs, as far as the subject matter and the albums they come from.
Any show that’s bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that’s the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!
Obviously I love working in film and television, but I started in theater and I’d love to be on Broadway.
As an actor, you generally don’t get to choose what projects you are part of, so I’ve been very fortunate that ‘The Book of Mormon’ was something I got to be part of. I don’t want to be lofty, but it was groundbreaking, in many ways, for musical theater, so that was really thrilling to be part of.
I’m very resistant to most forms of theater.
Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.
I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience’s ear a chance to understand what’s going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
I’ve loved musical theater ever since I was a kid. My mother’s a pianist, and my grandfather was an amateur theater director and stand-up comic. And I was an only child. And I loved attention. So from an early age, my family was teaching old musical songs.
I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it’s theater, film, TV.
‘Provenance’ is more than a multimedia concert. It’s a journey that unifies cultures through music, theater and beautiful visuals.
I had given up the theater and everything propelled me into entertainment. And I didn’t resist it.
In theater or movies you see either ‘I’m religious’ or ‘I’m an atheist.’ I’ve never seen too much discussion of ‘I believe there’s a higher power but I’m hesitant to reach out to him because I don’t know if I’m worthy of his attention.’
I love theater.
As soon as I read that, it clicked: that’s my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.
I wore goofy hats to school and did musical theater. Most people thought I was a dork. But if you have a sense of humor about it, no one can bring you down.
I was trained classically in violin and voice, which led to musical theater. Then I left the music scene to chase acting, which is when ‘Neighbours’ came along. It was a fantastic playground for actors, and the cast around me taught me a lot.
At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.
Do theater. Because you’ll develop a craft that you’ll always have. It’ll give you a chance to really learn how to act and you won’t go into the world with a few measly tricks that will only carry you so far.
With the Neal Morse Band, we’re doing progressive music with a harder edge; it’s a little more in Dream Theater territory for me. Flying Colors is a little more poppy, it’s more Radiohead, Muse, and Coldplay territory, so I approach that drumming in a different way.
I’d had the theater background for so long that I know that world inside out; I just didn’t know the pace of how a TV set works, like how a show shoots.
We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what’s happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option – not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others – of movies that are in the theater.
I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.
There’s nothing like the buzz of live theater. You put it out there and receive an instant reaction: laughing, crying, yelling, applauding.
Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.
I jump at any chance to go back into theater.
The energy of live theater is indescribable. You are just in the moment for an hour and a half.
It’s exciting to do something like this because usually what happens in theater is that, after the first or second reading of a play, it falls apart completely and the rehearsal process is such that you begin to pick up the pieces and put it back together again.
From his roots as a slave, the American Negro – sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful – has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.
To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
In the theater, you go from point A to point Z, building your performance as the evening progresses. You have to relinquish that control on a film.
I never thought about becoming an actor. Even when I applied for university, I didn’t choose theater as a major to become an actor.
I grew up doing musical theater. I went to a school for musical theater, so that was always what I wanted to do growing up.
I’ve been on the board of UCLA Film and TV School, and I went to UCLA. I realized that the same movie theater that was there when I went to school, 30 years later is the same movie theater in the same condition. There was an opportunity to refurbish an existing room, and I jumped at the opportunity.
The first thing I ever did was play talent shows at the Uptown Theater and the Adelphi Ballroom.
I vividly remember segregation – separate schools, sitting in the balcony at the movie theater, being barred from the public swimming pool.
One of the skills you have to master in theater is the ability to make the audience believe that things that aren’t there are there – just like when you’re acting against CGI. Also, in a theater, the people in the back row can’t see the whites of your eyes. Or your lips moving as you deliver dialogue.
Because I wanted to have a place that I could create everything that I that I never had as a child. So, you see rides. You see animals. There’s a movie theater.
In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.
I write for an audience that likes what I like, reads what I read, thinks about the things I think about. In many ways, this puts me in opposition to the people who go to the theater generally.
Everything has combined to make my life in New York an amazing experience. I told my manager a few years ago that I wanted to move here and try acting in the theater.
What I like about theater is its team work. Theater is also all-time creativity.
Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.
Corporate Hollywood thinks I’m a geek to go back and do theater. They don’t understand why I don’t want to be a movie star, why I’m not pursuing Mel Gibson’s roles.
We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.
Quite often – a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too.
We did four months on ‘Line of Duty’ from beginning to end, and that would be a long theater run.
I don’t think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that’s easy to understand, and there’s an actor who will attract them to the theater and it’s a movie that’s funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.
I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch ‘Titanic,’ and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.
When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it’s packaged as the Night Out, then that’s the death of it.
I thought I was going to be on Broadway. I thought, ‘I’m going to do theater.’
I regard the theater as a woman I loved dearly who treated me like dirt.
We used to play in a theater club in London called The King’s Head. When the theater let nut, around 10:00 P.M., we’d be ready to go and really get it on for about an hour or so.
You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you’ve got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!
I’ve learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.
I can work every day of the year. TV is easy. My call’s at 8:30 a.m. I’d like to break out of the comedy thing and take a shot at something serious like theater. The off-season allows me to do movies, but I’m not tired of TV yet. There’s nothing like it. I’ve got the best of both worlds.
