Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Costumes, Lighting, Set Design |
The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming, lighting, is to enhance the natural powers of the actor. |
Robert | Edmond Jones | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Set Design |
There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead. |
Robert | Edmond Jones | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Backstage, Lighting, Set Design |
If I wanted to have people tell me what to do, I would have become an actor. |
Rob | Hudd | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
Playwriting |
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation. |
Ring | Lardner | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Playwriting |
I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere. |
Richard Brinsley | Sheridan | http://www.brainyquote.com/ |
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 |
Acting |
When you're doing a play and you're afraid of a scene, that's the scene you should embrace, because that's the scene that will tell you something about the play. |
Raul | Esparza | NY Times, 11/26/06 |
Acting, Diversity & Inclusion, Shakespeare |
In a backstage interview during “The Taming of the Shrew,” Julia exclaims, “Some people think the only way to do Shakespeare is to do it like the British do it, because the British have the answer to Shakespeare! So I would imitate all the British.” He launches into a plummy version of “Othello,” and continues, “But then afterward I started realizing that I didn’t have to do it like that. I could bring myself to it. I could bring my own culture, my own Puerto Rican background, my own Spanish culture, my own rhythms.” Shakespeare benefitted from what Julia brought to his verse, which the actress Rita Moreno describes as salero. “It just means he was spicy,” she says, in the documentary. “And sexy, and tall!” |
Raul | Julia | New Yorker article by Michael Schulman, September 13, 2019 |
Acting, Shakespeare |
In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible. |
Ralph | Fiennes | http://www.ifc.com/fix/2011/12/ralph-fiennes-coriolanus-interview |
Acting |
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. |
Ralph | Richardson | http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/acting |