The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
I live in Philadelphia, and my wife and I do a lot of theater out in the Philadelphia community.
I took dance from a very early age, although my first recital, I remember refusing to go onstage. I think I was three. It's funny because that stage was also my high school theater stage.
I've always loved musical theater. It's a bit of a family tradition.
In 1969, I wrote a musical called 'Mother Earth.' It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater.
When I was a carpenter, I built sets for small storefront Chicago companies. Like, I built sets for friends of mine at The House Theater.
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.
In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.
One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.
We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.
When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.
I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.
All I wanted to do was create theater for us, for our generation, for the people of this planet. And it's so rare that the art that you are making is reaching a huge mass of people.
I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.
When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.
I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can't. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again.
My sense of responsibility to the audience is to screen things that they would never see in a local theater.
I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.
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.
There's nothing like the buzz of live theater. You put it out there and receive an instant reaction: laughing, crying, yelling, applauding.
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.
Some of the young kids look for one hit to be a star; that what they're known for the rest of their life... I never wanted to be known as one thing; that is the reason I do classical theater, write, direct and the blessings God has given me... I want to share.
I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.
I did theater as a kid, more of an after-school program. But every night I would put on a movie and fall asleep to it.
There will always be kids in every generation that understand that Lady Gaga is not music, it's theater.
I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.
The theater is a tough place. It's not cushioned the way it is in film and television.
I think my favorite place to eat dinner is the movie theater. Dirty dogs, a big thing of nachos and a Cherry Coke - and I'm good.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience.
The first time I got recognized in public was at a movie theater. It was at the 'Lord of the Rings' movie premiere. I was at the movie theater, and someone came up, and it was so weird to me, because I had never been recognized by a viewer, so I thought that was scary.
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.
Theater will always be a huge part of my life. The high I get from doing theater is not, quite honestly, matched by many things. I like the fact that when you step out on the stage, for that given night, for better or for worse, you are the master of the boards. I love it to death.
Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. And I love that it's like theater, too, and the audience, and it's so short. It's only 20 minutes. It's like a haiku or something.
