Repertory Quotes

He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. They were a kind of straw population, filling the world with their meaningless laughter and tears and chatter and disappearing still lovable and vain into thin air. For this distinction he cultivated his own definition of love that was like no other and that had gathered all its bitterness and pride from his odd life. He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living. There was (he believed) a great repertory of errors mercifully impossible to human beings who had recovered from this illness. Unfortunately there remained to them a host of failings, but at least (from among many illustrations) they never mistook a protracted amiability for the whole conduct of life, they never again regarded any human being, from a prince to a servant, as a mechanical object. ~ Thornton Wilder

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures. ~ Milan Kundera

Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles. ~ Angela Lansbury

I also try to surround myself with people I love - make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There's a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company. ~ Mel Brooks

I went to a lot of theatre schools, got a lot of training, did a lot of repertory where you do a different play every night. I took a lot of voice, movement, and acting classes. ~ Jeffrey Combs

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? ~ Robert Gottlieb

My second play, Yellow Fever, which came out at the Repertory Theatre a few months later was produced by Lewis Casson, the husband of Sybil Thorndyke, who was at that time the producer of the old Repertory Theatre in Glasgow. He is an extraordinarily interesting man, quite apart from the theatre. I believe he invented the first poison gas projector to be used on the Somme. ~ Dot Allan

The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch. ~ Mason Cooley

I was in the movies. I danced, I sang, I learned to work in front of a camera. It was like being in a repertory company. ~ Robert Wagner

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in. ~ Ajay Naidu

Consumers do not buy one brand of soap, or coffee, or detergent. They have a repertory of four or five brands, and move from one to another. They almost never buy a brand which has not been admitted to their repertory during its first year on the market. ~ David Ogilvy

Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water. ~ Siobhan Davies

I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem. ~ Ishmael Reed

In film you have the script months ahead of time often, for a good film, but in television it seems like you might not get the script until a week or two weeks before you've got to film it. It's a little weird, but also quite challenging. It reminds me of repertory theatre. ~ Wesley Snipes

When I was about 6, my cousin was very active in a Filipino repertory company, doing musicals and plays. Her aunt was one of the founders of the company, and she told my mom that there were these auditions for 'The King and I,' and that they needed kids. I auditioned, got in and the love affair started from there and just kept going. ~ Lea Salonga

The one thing you can ask, I think, is that actors get paid a living wage. I would like it if all the repertory theatres that currently exist could do that. It would make a huge difference. ~ Ian McKellen

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time. ~ Annette Bening

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. ~ Gore Vidal

When I was beginning, a young actor could go from repertory company to repertory company. I did that and loved it. I was also lucky. ~ Blythe Danner

Repertory theater is all about being part of the whole, one of the many colors in this vast palette. ~ Tom Hanks

My first role was in the George Gershwin musical 'Crazy for You' at the Orlando Repertory Theatre when I was 11 - I grew up in Florida - and I wasn't old enough to be in it, but they let me anyway. I was just this little shrimp in a leotard. ~ Aubrey Peeples

If you want to act, do school plays. If they're not there, create them, and the same with local repertory. They are the grounding for a lot of people. Make it happen. ~ William Kircher

Beware 'good' main characters who have a limited repertory of culturally acceptable feelings, while your evil bastards have a full range of vivid, passionate feelings. ~ Bill Johnson

Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty ... Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially. ~ E. O. Wilson

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context. ~ Nicholas Kristof

The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right. ~ Robert Gottlieb

I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout. ~ M. C. Gainey

I came out of repertory theater, where I worked 50 weeks a year, and I loved working with the people. ~ Rene Auberjonois

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers. ~ Robert Gottlieb

I was a repertory actor, which meant that I did a play every week. I was a different character every week; for a year, I was doing 40 or 50 characters. ~ Michael Caine

Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it's the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections. ~ Abigail Thomas

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up … For thirty years you've been talking . . . You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You're fed up … From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism. ~ Minnie Maddern Fiske

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

Then I left school at 16 and worked in Perth Repertory Theatre, which was quite nearby where I lived. And I worked there for about six or seven months, as part of the stage crew. ~ Ewan McGregor

I have no qualm about the quality of the contemporary repertory, ~ John Bonham

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'. ~ Joan Didion

During the war, my mother used to take me to the local repertory theatre on a Monday night, and we used to get two seats for the price of one, for nine pence, in the gods. ~ Geraldine McEwan

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

Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started. ~ Christopher Reeve

Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy. ~ Dick Cavett