Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Acting |
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. |
Spencer | Tracy | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Whatever you do kid, always serve it with a little dressing. |
George M. | Cohan | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Use your weaknesses; aspire to the strength. |
Laurence | Olivier | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Pray to God and say the lines. |
Bette | Davis | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Act in your pauses. |
Ellen | Terry | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man. |
Sanford | Meisner | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Don't think you're funny. It'll never work if you think you're funny. |
George | Abbott | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life. |
Albert | Finney | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are. |
Marlon | Brando | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much. |
John | Wayne | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author--or some other author--to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well. |
George Bernard | Shaw | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
If you achieve success, you will get applause. Enjoy it--but never quite believe it. |
Robert | Montgomery | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Don't use your conscious past, use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little. |
Stella | Adler | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor, however, it is absolutely essential. |
Robert | Morley | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made. |
George | Burns | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance. |
Shirley | Booth | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Lead the audience by the nose to the thought. |
Laurence | Olivier | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
Walk in, plant yourself, look the other person in the eye, and tell the truth. |
James | Cagney | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting |
What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin. |
Katherine | Hepburn | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
Acting, Playwriting |
A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor. |
Eric | Bentley | In Search of Theater |
Acting, Directing, General |
In creating and performing in a play, there is a sense of common purpose, of living something outside of yourself, of hauling to one common goal. All these different artistic disciplines are corralled into one purpose, and in the process, incredibly strong bonds are created. |
Eric | Stern | It Happened On Broadway |
Acting, Backstage, Directing, General |
There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show--all are family. |
John | Kander | It Happened On Broadway |
Costumes |
Your eyes will always go to red, which is why there is a lady in red in all my shows. |
Florence | Klotz | It Happened On Broadway |
Lighting |
Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone. |
Jules | Fisher | It Happened On Broadway |
Lighting |
Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction. |
Jules | Fisher | It Happened On Broadway |
Playwriting |
I want to make the audience laugh and cry within ten seconds, to show just how close those emotions are. |
Neil | Simon | It Happened On Broadway |
Directing |
Casting is instrumental in helping you understand the play. If you cast it right, as soon as the actor steps on the stage, you get certain impressions that help you understand what the play is about. |
Howard | Kissel | It Happened On Broadway |
Acting |
Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you. |
Carol | Channing | It Happened On Broadway |
Acting |
Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it. |
Elaine | Stritch | It Happened On Broadway |
Acting |
The fun for me is knowing what the other person is saying and what my character would be thinking at that time. On the stage you get the chance to do all that, to analyze and build a part, to react, to contribute something no one else can--not the author, not even the director. |
Barry | Nelson | It Happened On Broadway |
Shakespeare |
Brush up your Shakespeare |
Cole | Porter | Kiss Me, Kate (musical) |
General, Musical Theatre |
There is a traditional trick that theatre people have played as long as I can remember. A veteran member of a company will order a gullible newcomer to find the key to the curtain. Naturally, the joke is there is no such thing. I have been in the theatre over fifty years, and I don't think anyone would consider me naive, but all my life I've been searching for that key. And I'm still looking. . . . |
Richard | Rodgers | Musical Stages |
General, Musical Theatre |
A flop is often the result of the fact that each of the talents involved, while working on the same project, may in effect have been working on a different show from all the others. If all contributors do not share the same vision of the evening, the end product will not evince the harmony of diverse elements--the seeming inevitability of book, score, and staging--of a good musical. |
Ethan | Mordden | Not Since Carrie |
Playwriting, Shakespeare |
Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours are even worse. [Tolstoy to Chekov] |
Leo | Tolstoy | Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, by Joseph Epstein |
Playwriting |
Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me. |
Neil | Simon | Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater |
Directing, Musical Theatre |
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 | Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater |
Playwriting |
I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced--although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world--what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done. |
Lillian | Hellman | Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers On Theater |
Lighting |
An effective lighting design is like a beautiful painting. Your medium is bringing someone to an emotional state he or she would not achieve at that moment without your art. This does not and can not happen by accident. |
Glen | Cunningham | Stage Lighting Revealed |
General |
The cast, staff, and crew of a live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Thus, theater is necessarily a group effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats--a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the others, and may overlap others in function when necessary. But each autocrat assumes distinct responsibilities and accepts them completely. |
Lawrence | Stern | Stage Management |