Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.
You know, 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior' was part of my childhood, and that's why I'm so close to it. I remember seeing those movies at a drive-in theater with my parents when I was very young.
The success of 'Scrubs' allowed me to pursue anything I felt passionately about without having to worry about money. It allowed me to spend my summer work shopping my show at a nonprofit theater.
Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
To stay around any place you love, you have to have a job. In college at Georgetown in the fifties, I got my first theater job checking coats at the National, which was Washington's main theater.
'The Master,' it was really important to me to go see that in the theater, but that's a very rare occurrence for me. I typically enjoy things on my laptop. I'm in bed; I can be able to pause them.
My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
It was - I'm very didactic in my lyrics, but I've always been drawn to mock my own emotions, and so I write this very lyric-heavy stuff, which suits theater and comedy much more than it suits pop.
Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.
I was definitely Theater-Band Geek/Straight-Up Boss Subgroup C. I was really into band and theater and super into music at the time. I loved performing arts, and that would definitely be my group.
The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.
I was always the smallest role in community theater and school plays. I always had two lines - I was the kid that came on stage and said one thing and then left, and that was my part for the play.
I held down as many jobs as I could find, from being a waiter to working at a yoga studio and as a ticket-taker at a small theater company - anything that would allow me to go out and do auditions.
Theater is perhaps one of the few places left where we are in a dialogue right now. Everything has become so partisan, and the rhetoric has become so heated, that conversation is almost impossible.
I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the theater the minute I graduated from college having not pursued it! So I went back to school and got a degree in music and began working in musical theater.
I wrote a play that I directed and I was in, and I paid for the sets and the costumes and to put it up in a theater all through modeling. It really afforded me a lot of creative control in my life.
I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.
I did a play I think my first six months on the show, called Bullpen. Then I got involved with Theater Forty and did this play called Plastic which is about two male models coming to a casting call.
During a trip to Iraq last fall, I visited our theater hospital at Balad Air Force Base and witnessed these skilled medical professionals in action and met the brave soldiers whose lives they saved.
The big difference between TV and theater is that you get to do a new play every week, so it's quite challenging, but it keeps you fresh. There's never any fear of getting stale in your performance.
I came to NYU to study experimental theater. Shortly thereafter, I was featured in a 'Newsweek' article about the emerging downtown club scene, and, well, that was it for NYU. I was off and running.
We record Dream Theater shows and I'll sit on the bus and listen to my playing - what worked, what didn't. A lot of times it's embarrassing and humbling, but that's what you have to do to get better.
In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.
I had a hard-scrabble childhood with my parents. I have a lot of baggage. To come down to the footlights and accept the audience's affection inside a Broadway theater - that didn't come easily to me.
The originating sin of America is slavery, for which reparations should be paid and will never be paid; as a result, mini-reparations are paid daily, and the NBA remains, for me, reparations theater.
Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.
I was probably never going to get to do the kind of things dramatically that I really wanted to do, so I returned to theater from time to time, and to write, and produce. It's by no means sour grapes.
For a long time after I left 'Bonanza,' I was considered too independent. That meant I got the rejects other actors could afford turning down. I did theater which I loved, but it cannot pay the bills.
At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
I had one of the best days of my life. I spent the afternoon with my two kids and my ex-wife at Serendipity. Then I came to the theater, and you know, I think I did the play the best I've ever done it.
The best sounds a kid will get is in a movie theater, with huge speakers, turned up loud. I always mix my music really loud. I don't care if you don't hear all the dialogue. The audience are not idiots.
the audience is the controlling factor in the actor's life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.
The original release of 'Star Wars' was literally the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. Four years old was probably too young - I recall believing, for some time, that Darth Vader was a robot.
Doing theater, I call it concentrated shampoo. You put a dime in the palm of your hand and you get a headful of lather. When you do a play, you're there for two and a half hours, and you live a lifetime.
God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.
I would love to be in musical theater and be on Broadway. If someone were to offer me a position to do something like that, I wouldnt pass it down. Im a huge fan of musicals and I really want to do that.
There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.
I was preparing myself for the theater, and... I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else.
It was a great opportunity that I had to take - my very own theater. That comes along once in a lifetime. It doesn't even seem like 15 years ago - time sure flies by. I've really had a lot of fun with it.
And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.
I guess I'm kind of a mutt. I was born in the U.S., my parents are from Mexico, and I grew up in Switzerland. It's weird because I sound American, but I spell theater 'theatre' with the 'r' before the 'e'.
The word 'improv' always makes me feel a little anxious because I always feel like we'll have to pull props out of a bag and find 800 different ways to talk about a stick, the way you do in theater school.
I love doing this day, and George was exactly as he's always been, very calm and very gentle, and if I'm in the final cut in the summer theater, I'll be thrilled. If I'm not, well that's the way things go.
I was a theater actor back in the U.K., and you knew the whole play, so you could plot your storyline and character. And then I did 'Lost' and didn't know, and it was kind of frustrating, but I enjoyed it.
I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
I'm interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance; that will get everybody in the theater.
You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.
Doing that, then doing a lot of theater, which I love. Doing guest stars, did two independent films that are going around to all these festivals. Both of them are going to be at the Lake Tahoe Film Festival.