Phyllida Lloyd Quotes

I want to be the Letterman of metal. I want five nights a week, Monday to Friday, 11 to 12, live. I always shoot for the moon.

I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.

My job, live television, broadcasting, there's mania involved in there, too, but it's the good stuff.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

I love doing live TV.

If you drop a line in the theatre, you can usually find a way round it. But you can't do that as easily on television - you're in the hands of too many people.

In theatre, previews are the first draft of a show. I strongly believe that. The only way we can truly tell whether that draft works is by having an audience present.

When 'The Sound of Music' aired live on NBC, 18 million people were talking about theater the next day. That's incredible. 'Grease' felt like a chance for me to participate in that landscape.

I feel like when you're dancing, especially how we're doing it on live television, you need to give that energy to the camera which is mainly with your face.

The stage is bigger than life. There you are projecting to an audience. In television, you're drawing the camera in to you. And with TV, there isn't that immediate feedback from an audience. You do hours and hours of taping and never get that response.

Theatre is a living organism. You only know if your show is working when you see it with an audience. You can also tell when it isn't working - it's horrible, and you desperately try to figure out how to make it connect.

Radio is immediate and experimental. It's really lo-fi - you can have an idea, go out and record something, come back in and just put it on air.

I'm a television presenter, television is my first love.

The thing is that, not only do you learn so much about being in front of a camera and stuff being on 'Monday Night RAW,' but at the same time, I'm not really acting on 'Monday Night RAW.'

I worked on a weekly one-hour show live from Los Angeles called 'The Dixie Boat Show.' We only had one camera, so there was a lot of panning because it was always on, and anything that went wrong, from actors fluffing their lines to sets falling down in mid-scene, you let it go by.

One of my first festivals was Oxygen 2006. It had this amazing lineup with the Arctic Monkeys on their first or second album, the Strokes, Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers and then the Who and James Brown. I waited in the pit for a good eight hours to see James Brown.

I love live TV, and there's no replacing or faking.

I like the fact that in the theatre nothing is ever finished because you're going to do it all over again tomorrow, whereas in telly once it's wrapped and in the can, that's it.

Live television is just like competing on live TV. You're never going to be perfect. You just try to prepare the best that you can and execute the best that you can and try to be in the moment.

Most musicals are real crowd pleasers.

We couldn't even contemplate doing 'Hairspray' without a live audience.

I'm old enough to remember seeing James Brown live.

I never thought I'd be doing TV. I've always loved it, but I felt like I was just going to do Broadway because that was what I wanted to do the most.

I would love to do co-hosting somewhere to some degree.

While a lot of hip-hop was inspired by jazz or James Brown samples and was made to be played live in the clubs, I made hip-hop that was made for MCs to eat the mic up. It was an aggressive form of hip-hop. It was made just for hip-hop. It's not made to sing or dance to, though you can if you want.