The excitement of being in a rehearsal room is good for me.
It is quite amazing how hard the subconscious works when it is made to understand that this life is not a rehearsal, there is no safety net and no assurance of any final closure. It is also quite appalling to realize how catatonic the imagination can become when we hedge our bets, opt for the safer direction at every fork in the path.
Life is not a rehearsal.
James Ivory comes close to the actors for the first rehearsal. He more or less lets you direct yourself and then will only correct you if he finds it incorrect.
I'm not one to dwell on rehearsal or preparation.
I love opening night, and I love doing plays. But one of my favorite parts about doing a play or working on a new play is rehearsal.
I really love the process, with stage, of rehearsal, you get to create a character, and you have a beginning, a middle, and an end of story. And in television, you don't.
The best thing I ever bought is a vintage Oscar de la Renta short gingham dress that I wore to my rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding.
Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal - the vision, the structure, the architecture.
I love to argue and share bright ideas in a rehearsal room, and when you live with somebody who is working on the same show, the delight can go on all evening!
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
When I go into rehearsal rooms and meet with bands, they're genuinely excited to be with me because of what I've done as an artist, not because of anything else. There's that whole celebrity rock star thing, and artists are into artists who have been able to achieve success their way.
It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
The process of rehearsal means you learn so much and really get the chance to develop your work on a character.
'Birdman' is basically 'All About Eve' - the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate - reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn't be actor-ier.
We have different personalities, but in a harmonious way, I'd say. Anyway, we were booked to play at the festival as a duo; and we decided we wouldn't have any rehearsal.
Then, in 2000, John Reid, Elton John's former manager, asked me to audition for the stage version of The Graduate he was producing. So I worked on it, got the part, and after three weeks' rehearsal I was on stage!
When you're in a rehearsal room, it's like getting into a car and going on a long journey with everyone's stuff in the back. If you keep stopping the car and going, 'Are you sure we want to go?' and think, 'This is really daunting,' you will get frightened, so you just have to keep ploughing through it.
I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself.
In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.
I would rather play Hamlet with no rehearsal than TV golf.
Studios are passe for me. I'd rather play in a garage, in a truck, or a rehearsal hall, a club, or a basement.
If Broadway shows charge preview prices while the cast is in dress rehearsal, why should restaurants charge full price when their dining room and kitchen staffs are still practicing?
Life is definitely not a rehearsal, this is it.
You'd go in, read the script once for timing and then you would sit around and play games. The sound effects people would come in and we would do a dress rehearsal so they could get the effects and the music cues in place. Then you would wait until you went on the air.
When you're young and starting out, the big hurdle is to relax enough in rehearsal so that you don't feel intimidated. The more work you've done, the more you can experiment in rehearsal and not have to worry about getting the sack.
A movie is a filmed rehearsal in a way. The audience doesn't know that because you're taking out the things that don't work. There's no comparison to the theater because it's live. But making a movie is just as challenging and exciting, I find. A movie is pure process. The theater is the result of process.
I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.
When Seymour saw me seated at the piano at that first rehearsal, he shouted: 'What's that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let's get started.'
There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity; over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though. And the cameraman is very important, of course.
What looks absolutely fabulous in rehearsal can fall flat in front of an audience. The audience dictates what you do or don't change.
For a London play, rehearsal time would be four weeks for the entire show. In films, I'd spend six weeks on the big dance numbers to get them perfect before the actual shooting.
To pay 60 musicians for rehearsal and performance is quite something, and I decided I wouldn't be able to handle that kind of situation financially again, unless somebody else was taking care of that end of it.
I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.
The best thing I ever heard was in the '60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow' after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant.
It is a lot cheaper to spend eight hours in a rehearsal hall than in a recording studio.
