The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If you're not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, you're kind of stuck.
You can do stuff onstage that you can't do offstage. You can be angry as hell and enraged and get away with it onstage, but not off.
Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
I dearly remember the old days... Fleetwood Mac had this one-of-a-kind charm. They were gregarious, charming and cheeky onstage. Very cheeky. They'd have a good time.
There's something about being onstage, singing my lyrics to somebody and them either listening and receiving them, or singing them back to me, that I just can't get enough of.
Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.
It's funny, I used to do a character that was just a baby - just an adult baby. I would get up onstage and complain about adult stuff, but as a baby. I was in a diaper, and I would require hugs from the audience and reassurance and stuff.
If I go onstage, I want to give people everything they want and more. I'll wash their car for them on their way out.
'Saturday Night Live' is a very particular beast. What it celebrates are individuals who can stand out. I did good work there, but going onstage and saying, 'Hey! Hey! Look at me! Aren't I funny?' - that just wasn't my instinct.
My intention of making acting a career was about being onstage.
Being a growing entertainer, period, you're going to always have struggles. I'm still trying to learn how to even perform right onstage.
Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.
If I had my way, I'd always be onstage. But I won't always be able to be onstage.
I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.
Most people think the character I do onstage is the way I am offstage, but I'm just a regular guy who spends time with his family and who turns on the television and watches a lot of sports.
Performing is my passion. Being onstage is at once exhilarating, beguiling, and fulfilling. But it's hard.
I started as a straight actor. I'd go onstage, and I'd think, 'Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don't care - I'll do it again.'
I learned my profession onstage. I didn't have a musical background. I had no conservatory training. I don't play an instrument.
I can totally identify with the younger kids. I'll never do what Jon Spencer did to me when I was 16, though. I made a tape with my friends and I put it onstage right near his mic stand by the pedal board and he pulled it out with his foot, kicked it to the center of the stage, looked me in the eye and stomped it to pieces.
I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist. I try not to talk about something unless it's something I love. But if it's something that really annoys me, I fixate on it, learn something about it and then, when I'm onstage, it comes out.
Also, as I've gotten older and more mature, I've become much more comfortable in my own skin. After 25 years of doing stand-up, that's reflected onstage.
I love being onstage, whether it's dancing or acting - there's just something about being onstage.
I like to do the splits onstage.
I laugh all the time - at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don't laugh onstage because then it's serious business.
I missed being onstage behind the microphone. After a while, it was hard to hear another voice singing my lyrics.
I'm not a really religious person, but those moments onstage feel like some sort of religious experience because no one holds back, especially 'Stay With Me' when I finish the show. It kind of turns into an anthem when I perform it live, and it feels like there's a lot of love in the room.
When I work onstage, I want to play roles that have real, deep theatricality, that aren't the sort you would easily see on television and in the movies.
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.
My thing is to get up there and have a good time and give the fans all you can and appreciate them spending their money and being in the stands - and just be appreciative of them cheering when you come onstage.
I can't even imagine something being more fun than playing James Brown onstage.
Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.
Onstage, I find absolutely nothing but exhilaration in not talking.
Frontmen come alive when they come onstage.
We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
I'm on a single track here - I work to direct what I want to see onstage. I basically have been feeding my own needs - to be working on a specific project at a specific time, and fortunately more often it works than fails.