Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Backstage |
If we could read minds, we wouldn't need headsets. |
Tommy | Kendrick | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
Management |
In community theatres, "doers" seem to do the following: act, direct, choreograph, accompany, design, build, find, sew, sell, or usher. "Managers" plan, organize, staff, supervise and evaluate. Doers, like directors and crew chiefs, also "manage," and managers like stage managers also sometimes "do"--find props, paint sets, or hang lights. Leaders can also be managers and/or doers, but in their leadership capacity their activities include these: dreaming, pushing, causing to grow, problem-solving and inspiring. Their qualities of intelligence, imagination, commitment, perseverance, and passion are the very qualities that invite the rest of us to say "Yes!" |
Twink | Lynch | Boards In the Spotlight, p. 95 |
Directing, Shakespeare |
The play loses a great deal of its meaning if it is robbed of a magic which springs, not from the glittering tip of a department-store wand, but from the earth, the stones, the very air of the wood; and a magic which is not merely pretty but dark and dangerous. [said of A Midsummer Night's Dream |
Tyrone | Guthrie | |
Acting |
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go. |
Uta | Hagen | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. |
Uta | Hagen | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Acting |
I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Acting |
I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most. |
Uta | Hagen | |
Playwriting |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising. |
Vaclav | Havel | |
Playwriting |
White male playwrights' works continue to dominate production slates. Sometimes it seems easier for them to have the texts of their driver's licenses produced than for the female or non-white playwright to have her best play produced. The reality is, they are more often given that all-important opportunity to fail than the women's play or ethnic play. |
Velina Hasu | Houston | http://www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/artweb/playwriting/quotes.html |
Playwriting |
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake. |
W.H. | Auden | |
Musical Theatre |
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds. |
Wallace | Shawn | http://www.curtainup.com/timelyquotes.html |
Critics |
Reviewers must normally function as huff-and-puff artists blowing laggard theatergoers stageward. |
Walter | Kerr | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_kerr.html |
Musical Theatre |
Wherever it came from, the musical came with its hair mussed and with an innocent, indolent, irreverent look on its bright, bland face. |
Walter | Kerr | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_kerr.html |
General |
It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times. |
William | Prynne | http://izquotes.com/ |
Acting |
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. [Hamlet] |
William | Shakespeare | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
General |
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. |
William | Inge | Saturday Review 22 Feb 64 |
Fundraising |
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. |
William | James | http://www.museummarketingtips.com/quotes/giving.html |
Management |
The core challenge for us as arts managers is to deal with change: changing external environmental conditions, evolving styles and approaches to the arts by our artists, advancements iin how we present and distribute our art to our ever-changing audiences, and the shifting competition for resources and attention. |
William J. | Byrnes | Management and the Arts (Fifth Edition) |