I love that moment just before the curtain goes up, whether I’m sitting in the audience or standing backstage. It’s full of expectation. It’s a thrill that’s unequaled anywhere.
As African-Americans, we don’t start with a blank slate, while other people may. In our position, there’s always some sort of stereotype that is being scrutinized or that is being assumed when we come through the curtain.
That’s kind of fuse for the show – those first 10-15 seconds you’re onstage. The curtain drops and you see the crowd for the first time and they see you for the first time. The response and the energy that’s going on right there – to me, that sets the tone for the rest of the night.
It’s not scary to make a horror film because you get to pull back the curtain and see that none of it’s real. When you’re watching one, the terror bombards you.
The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power.
You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you’re in another world.
What’s exciting is there’s a curtain that divides the audience from this other world. You want to see behind.
I was a rabid ‘Seinfeld’ fan. Then I did the show, and it ruined the show for me. Not that it ruined the quality of the show, but I had seen behind the curtain at Oz.
When I’m in the ring, I’m doing great. As Razor Ramon or the ‘Bad Guy,’ I don’t have a care in the world. But when I come back through the curtain, reality is there waiting.
I love good balance, so being a collector is a fun little thing while we travel this world. I mean, every night, it’s something else. The other night, I head-banged a dude on my rental car and drove him through the curtain in my rental car. So some moments are not as good as others, but they are all fun, that’s for sure.
It’s strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn’t even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s.
Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain.
I don’t think it’s a director’s job to peek behind the curtain too much.
An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.
I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.
It was the Victorians who covered the piano legs and drew a heavy curtain over what a lady got up to in her boudoir.
Believe me, it jabs you. When you’re on the side of buses and New York loves you, you love to go out there every night. It’s like a race. Curtain opens, out you go, and New York is yours.
I don’t want to live in a militarised country behind an iron curtain. It’s boring. Been there and seen the movie. I’ve done that.
Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.
My father built me a theatre behind the house where I could put on plays. Dear me, I’m making it sound a bit grand, and it wasn’t an amphitheatre or anything like that, just a little place with a roll-up curtain box and I’m sure the plays were childish lopsided things.
Anybody who’s done standup will tell you that there’s nothing like it. The show starts at 8:00, the curtain goes up and there’s nobody else except you and the audience, and you just perform for them for two hours. Nobody yells, ‘Cut!’ There are no retakes. That is still the most exciting medium for me, and I love it.
There’s no perfect life. There’s always something going on behind the curtain that people don’t know about.
On matinee days I could never be sure I’d make the curtain for the matinee. I’d put on my makeup in the morning, rush to the studio and do the radio shows,then try to get across town before the curtain went up.
In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
In Utah, the American melting pot is unstirred. Three out of four people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful sanctuary ‘behind the Zion curtain’ because of religious persecution.
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.
The thing about Instagram and fashion is that is has absolutely taken down the sense of the velvet rope and has pulled the curtain aside on the entire experience that used to be for a select 100 people in the world. Now it is there for millions of people to consume.
People look at me and go, ‘You must have it made. You have girls. You have a great life.’ It’s not true. I mean you pull the curtain away, and you see I’m just as insecure and neurotic and scared and vulnerable as anybody, you know.
When I served in the Army, along the Iron Curtain we had a word for a person who absconds with information and provides it to another nation: traitor. We also had a name for a person who chooses to reveal secrets he had personally promised to protect: common criminal.
I have a whole box full of pieces of the Berlin Wall and a heart made from the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain. It’s – they’re cherished treasures to me now, of course.
I’ll always remember listening to Mark Radcliffe playing Sonic Youth. I felt this instant connection, it offered me a peak behind a curtain into this world that I’d never experienced. I wanted to be part of it.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, ‘No one’s told me what to do with this show. I’ve done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren’t I lucky?’ It really is amazing.
Someone asked me who I would be if I were a character in the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ I would be the curtain. I would be the one who saw both sides that nobody noticed, that was pretty and there to be used and discarded when they were done.
If you peek behind the curtain at any type of company, you’ll see that things are far less organized than you’d expect.
I was an immigrant. I came here at 12. We were caught behind the Iron Curtain until I was 10.
That’s the place we’re in right now: we think we have the capability to get every piece of information, and we don’t. We don’t know what’s going on behind the closed curtain. If we want to say we live in a free democratic society, we should be able to find out whatever we want to.
I’ll give you my worst nightmare. I’m dreaming that I’m onstage, the curtain goes up, and I have no idea what my lines are or what’s going on. I think I should know, I kind of know, I remember rehearsing… and the audience is there waiting.
Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries.
Ke$ha is her art; there is no curtain you peel back to find the real person. And with Ke$ha, you never know what to expect when you’re in the studio.
One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet’s curtain calls is the Royal Ballet’s dancing.
I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.
Now that we are used to globalisation it’s hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if ‘the Russians love their children too.’
He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
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