Anspacher Theatre Quotes

Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not it is amateur night ... Either musicals should be written for specified performers in the first place, or they should be cast with people who are adequate to its dancing, acting and singing demands. ~ Ernest Gold

The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years. ~ Michael Caine

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover. ~ Sam Shepard

The only way that you can keep moving forward, finding other ways of expressing things about this increasingly complicated world that we live in, is by listening and observing not only to life around you but to the other people who are in the room. It's not about a sort of, you know, a sense that you have to be democratic about these things, it's a question of creativity that the process of making theatre is a collaborative process, and it is not in, it is not a question of, you know, I have no interest in paying lip service to it, for me it's absolutely fundamental. ~ Simon McBurney

So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author's words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb or saying such as: "He who is good to others will be happy." But this is not true. It is a lie. The spectator, perhaps, is content. The spectator likes easy truths. But we are not there to please or pander to the spectator. We are here to tell the truth. ~ Jerzy Grotowski

Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged. ~ Henry James

The great theatre for virtue is conscience. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them. ~ Leslie Jamison

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that's really where my training is. ~ Christopher Walken

I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting. ~ Jim Henson

The interest of my mother was more in the entertainment field. She loved to go to concerts and to the theatre. ~ Leon Askin

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment. ~ Robert Plant

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos

We had our British background of traditional theatre behind us. ~ Peter Capaldi

Theatre is about the collective imagination ... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV. ~ Simon McBurney

Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise. ~ Henry Miller

I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 17. ~ Gugu Mbatha-Raw

I can go to my premiere at the Chinese Theatre, and everyone will know me, and everyone will cater to me. And then I'll go to an audition and get rejected left, right and centre. They don't watch my videos, and they don't really know who I am. It is like starting from scratch when it comes to traditional Hollywood. ~ Lilly Singh

As we get older ... I don't know a single person who has devoted their life to musical theatre who hasn't had a couple of misses as well as a bunch of hits. The misses, we learn a great deal from them. ~ Maury Yeston

I grew up dancing, and for a while in college, I was a gym rat. I finally realized ... I'm going to create a little more balance in my life and make exercise something that I enjoy doing. So I went back to dance when I started doing more musical theatre, and I've just found that it's the best thing that works for my body. ~ Christine Lakin

I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from. ~ James Purefoy

The dramatist's function is (1) to earn a living for his family and himself and (2) to try to entertain people for a few hours. ~ Lee Adams

I find it difficult to fully enjoy musical theatre songs if I don't know the storyline of the show they are from as well as the context. ~ Christian Campbell

Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage. ~ Ellen Terry

The first theatre I ever found was in the backyard of a new suburban community in the foothills of the Poconos. My dad was a young FBI agent at his first or second posting - we're all from New York. He was posted in Scranton, Pennsylvania and he put the family in a brand new red-brick apartment. It was in a C-shape and behind it was a small hill that led up to the woods. There was a white-washed brick wall that was a perfect theatre! There were windows and all the ladies behind the windows in their apartments. I would go out there after lunch every day and sing opera. ~ Constantin Stanislavski

During [Erté]'s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century …

In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company …

It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an o ~ Charles Spencer

In 1969, I wrote a musical called 'Mother Earth.' It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater. ~ Toni Tennille

I was trained on stage at NYU in New York City; I did a lot of theatre then. ~ Michaela Conlin

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for? ~ David Hare

I'm thinking of doing more theatre. It makes me very happy. ~ Rachel Weisz

I was going to be a High School teacher. I was studying at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, up in Canada. I was also acting in a wonderfully supportive theatre community in Edmonton. There's a lot of support for theatre there. So, I was having a great time, but I didn't consider acting as a serious career initially, because even the most successful actors that I know in Edmonton are not super successful. Acting over there is just not a success-oriented career. ~ Nathan Fillion

Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act. ~ John Carroll

Pray to God and say the lines. ~ Bette Davis

That's opera! I just love it. It just thrills me! And it's very different than theatre, and sometimes it can be frustrating because when you come in the first day of rehearsals obviously you're an opera fan, right? ~ Jason Graae

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds. ~ Lee Hall

A fan once stopped me outside a theatre and gave me as a gift a signed photograph of Sir Laurence Olivier. It was strange, but nice, too. ~ David Alan Basche

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman. ~ Alain De Botton

Both mediums, theatre and film, have really interesting sides to it that I really like to explore. ~ Tom Wlaschiha

The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate. ~ Kyo Maclear

She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I think about entrance and exits. I think about dialogue. But most of all I think about voice - all character development in theatre is done through voice. And as I wrote my debut novel "The Big Fear", I thought about narrative voice with every line. ~ Andrew Case

A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I've done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country. ~ Laila Robins