I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
I like to read. I go to movies quite a bit. I often go to see friends in theater productions. I hike, stretch and work out. I like to sing. I love going back to acting class and working on new material.
I spent 10 years in New York doing theater.
I got into theater at an early age.
The way theater can bring people together is so powerful.
I've always loved film more than theater.
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.
I am both proud and honored to be on the Board of Directors for the Texas Ballet Theater.
I majored in theater at San Diego State. My one eye was on football, and my other eye was on Hollywood.
Because of my background in theater and radio acting, I knew that I could make a living as an actor.
A friend of mine had his own theater company, and he jumped me in like I was in a gang. And once I came in, it was just that simple. For the first time in my life, I felt, 'This is a career, this is a life that I think I can grow old doing.' It was love at first sight. I loved being on stage and reading these plays. It was great.
What's funny is my mom took me to the theater for the first time when I was six years old, and I was just amazed by it. I just said, 'Hey Mom, can I do this too?' And so she signed me up for little theater classes, and I remember my first audition for a play when I was seven years old was for 'The Thankful Elf.'
I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.
I was living in London and I thought, 'There's nothing here for me anymore.' I don't want to become this actor who's going to be doing this occasional good work in the theater and then ever diminishing bad television. I thought I'd rather do bad movies than bad television because you get more money for it.
Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.
I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.
Today's restaurant is theater on a grand scale.
I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.
I started out doing theater and a soap in New York and that's... sort of what I got stuck in. I was blessed enough to have long runs, and it's sort of hard sometimes then to get out.
I think more than anything, you should do what you love. If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.
I had done a lot of plays, particularly at my own theater in LA, and it was the first time in my theatrical life where I didn't feel that my role was also to keep everybody else working hard.
I think a lot of theater actors that were great, like Walken or Glenn Close, later became film actors.
I love that feeling of going into a packed theater.
Theater audiences don't pull punches. They'll let you know when they're feeling ripped off.
The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.
Theater is definitely something that, through the course of my childhood and even in college, I enjoyed participating in. I would love to do theater, or as far as movies or television goes, if the right thing came along I would definitely entertain it.
The reason why I like theater is because it's a long journey, and no matter what role you play, we are all in it together.
I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.
We film in front of a live audience, and I was a theater actor before I got into television, so I like that.
In theater, we know a scheduled season months in advance.
It's hard to make a living in this business. Unions aren't as strong as they used to be. For a journeyman actor - someone who doesn't have a famous name but has consistent work in theater or film or TV - it has become harder to get through, harder to raise a family.
I find theater terrifying. There are no do-overs, you know? It's all happening live. You need to be in it 100 percent at any given moment, and the audience is right there. I'm really intimidated by theater, but it is my first true love. I love theater. I love that anxiety.
