Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
General |
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway -- revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is -- a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture. |
Stephen | Sondheim | NY Times 3/12/00 |
Acting |
It's not enough to have talent, you have to have a talent for your talent. |
Stella | Adler | |
Acting, Directing |
The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. |
Stella | Adler | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
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 |
General |
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. |
Spencer | Tracy | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
General |
January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead. |
Sidonie | Gabrielle | |
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 |
We've put a man on the moon. If you miss a cue, no one will die. |
Shelli | Aderman | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html |
Acting |
Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live. |
Shelley | Winters | |
Playwriting |
I haven't really written my plays and books -- I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood. |
Sebastian | Barry | |
Acting |
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
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 |
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting |
The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear. |
Samuel | Johnson | |
General |
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. |
Samuel | Johnson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |