I didn’t know if I could be funny on stage or write a joke. But I saw that there are no rules. If you’re funny offstage, you can figure out a way to be funny onstage.
When you’re doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.
The body cannot lie. You cannot be somebody else onstage, no matter how good of an actor or dancer or singer you are. When you open your arms, move your finger, the audience knows who you are, you know.
I was very insecure growing up, and even though I’m not that girl anymore, I think that the passion, that not feeling pretty and being insecure, is where my soul came from. And from early childhood, I let it free onstage.
I’m just a Chicago actor who’s a playwright. Even with the success of ‘August,’ the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they’ve seen me onstage so much.
I didn’t think I could go onstage and play unless I had a beer to loosen up. Well, if it was only one beer to loosen up, I’d probably still be drinking today.
I actually got to go back to where I was born and perform there. I just brought my mom up onstage and was like, ‘Look, here we are.’
My thing is to get up there and have a good time and give the fans all you can and appreciate them spending their money and being in the stands – and just be appreciative of them cheering when you come onstage.
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don’t have to know more about them than they’ve given you already.
There’s a different feeling when you’ve played with musicians for 30 years. A lot of stuff doesn’t even need to be said, especially onstage. We just read each other so well.
If you get lazy when you’re onstage, it shows.
When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He’s responsible for my favorite New Year’s memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.
I love suits, but onstage it’s too hot. So, I like a nice T-shirt!
Baseball players practice, runners practice, so how can you practice being funny? You get up onstage. You train as an improviser, playing make-believe, using the vernacular of improvisation, saying ‘yes and’ to other people’s ideas, making statements.
We pray before everything – videos, onstage, TV shows. I think that has a lot to do with being successful.
Look at Greg Jbara! I’ve watched him work for years, always switching. He’s literally a different human being when he’s onstage in ‘Billy Elliot.’ That’s the fun of what we do.
I will say that, I, being a Jew, experience unease before I go onstage; and after I go onstage, and in general. But luckily the forty-five minutes to an hour that I’m onstage I usually forget everything else and I just press play.
I loved ‘Matilda.’ The kids are so brilliant and uninhibited. They were inspiring. Seeing them onstage, just going wild, reminded me of when I was that age. I was excited for them and completely taken by their innocence and hard work.
Those moments onstage when you realize what you and your compatriots are doing matters – someone in that room needs to hear that story, someone needs to escape or heal or learn or breathe, and remember, we’re all in this together.
Onstage, there’s no hiding; you either can or can’t act. There’s no second take.
There’s a character that I play onstage, and I can’t let him loose in the supermarket when I’m buying my beans on toast.
I don’t really have any kind of rigorous or definite routine before I go onstage. I like to eat at least an hour or two before I go on. If I can’t do that, I just wait until after. I try and drink lots of water before I go onstage.
Think about being onstage playing these songs. I’m opening my personal life up to all these people. But I just can’t get attached. I’ve got to separate myself from the music and lyrics.
When I work onstage, I want to play roles that have real, deep theatricality, that aren’t the sort you would easily see on television and in the movies.
I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There’s nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.
To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.
Being an emcee onstage is mostly about crowd control, about monitoring energy levels.
When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears.
I love being onstage and I love to perform. To be honest with you, I’m more comfortable performing than I am in an everyday situation, which I can’t quite explain.
The young man who’s had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life – he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he’s never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn’t walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn’t have a dream of doing well.
It’s nice to be able to show how we are like in person and give a peek behind the curtain with ‘Total Divas.’ That’s been my biggest feedback is how different than I am behind the scenes than I am onstage.
I just do my thing onstage – it’s just what happens. No one, even if they’re into the band, can know it’s as natural and real as anything can be. I don’t think about it.
Touring is tough. You’re almost in a haze because you don’t really know where you are half the time: You’re in a hotel room one moment, and the next thing you know, you’re onstage performing for 60,000 people, then you’re back on an airplane. It’s very hectic and I couldn’t do it without my family.
It’s funny how concert dreams are such a recurring thing among musicians. It’s like how everyone has that dream of their teeth falling out? Except musicians have this dream of just standing onstage and there being all these people out there, and for some reason, the song isn’t starting.
I was standing onstage last year, and I felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter how many people were out there, it all just felt like a blank sheet of paper.
Most people think the character I do onstage is the way I am offstage, but I’m just a regular guy who spends time with his family and who turns on the television and watches a lot of sports.
It’s definitely a high when you walk onstage and everybody starts applauding before you even say anything.
I’ve never acted, but I’m an entertainer. So I kind of used what I know from being onstage. I’ve done a thousand and two interviews, and I’ve been on camera a million times, so I’m not uncomfortable on camera, but it was interesting for me to be someone else.
I’ve been known to wear pajamas onstage for the sole reason of wanting to make sure I’m free enough to execute new things vocally onstage and give my best performance possible.
My goal was becoming the next David Copperfield. I learned how to be a performer by emulating him as a kid – his formula of just talking to people onstage, being free to improvise, being charming and witty with a crowd, together with great, beautiful magic.
I felt like onstage I have to have a certain amount of anonymity, like, personal anonymity, to feel loose and free. When you’re up there with people who’ve known you for a decade, and you make a bad joke and you hear the cackling behind the drums, it’s hard to get lost in the moment.
I’m getting to a point where everything is becoming streamlined in my life. I’m learning how to stand onstage for two hours and play in front of thousands of people as if I am completely in the moment every moment.
I suppose people do sometimes not understand the seeming disparity between my onstage personality and my public personality in the press. But I feel that I am definitely a louder, more outspoken person with those I am close to.
I was more used to acting onstage, for a long time. I don’t know, maybe I was temperamentally more suited to stage stuff. And there are things about the stage that I miss in a lot of ways.
There is a cliche that probably has some anecdotal evidence on the side that comedians are very depressed people, but that’s because no one is ever going to seem as funny in a normal conversation as compared to when they’re up there onstage in the spotlight making a huge audience keel over with laughter.
Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?
It’s not a bad thing to be able to do many things onstage. If you’re an entertainer, you should be able to entertain. I’m proud to say that I’m not a one-trick pony.
The fun image is what we project onstage, because our music is dance music. But it’s not what the group is about We’re very serious about our music and the band and producing good quality songs.
I think leather pants are just better than jeans onstage; they give the performance a nice attitude, and they are also shockingly comfortable. Comfort is key.
Certainly, I, as an audience, am stricken with terror if I see only two people onstage. And one person, I think, is even harder for people to take.
I have rage and anger issues. So I get mad about stuff in real life, and then I yell about it onstage, and luckily, something funny ends up coming out. What I’ll do is tape-record it, and it will end up coming out even funnier. And I add more punch lines.
