Henny Youngman Quotes

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

My parents used to take me to a lot of theatre when I was young.

I always say to my Twitter followers to come to the stage door and meet me. What I love about being in the theatre, rather than filming, is that you meet your audience.

I'm always up for going back to the stage.

My first ever stage performance was in Edinburgh in 1960.

I would love to do more on the stage; having actual contact with the audience is great. You can give them a good seeing to!

I performed in public for the first time at three years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was on a big stage. There were probably three or four hundred people in the audience. We were doing this dance, this Kermit the Frog routine, all of us in our little green leotards.

I enjoy working on stage. Having relationships with the audiences and question and answer sessions afterwards. I enjoy that.

I love performing in front of a live audience and just stepping out in front of ruddy Royal Albert Hall is just something, I can't describe it.

The first stage play I ever did was a school play called 'The Wishing Chair.'

I think 'Hair' is the kind of show that benefits from the live experience - it needs to be seen and heard.

I love performing, and connecting with an audience never gets old for me.

I think a lot of audience members don't realize the part that they play in live theatre. The audience actually has a mood. Sometimes they're tired and bored, and we have to wake them up and engage them.

I remember my first role as a sunflower at nine.

Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance.

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.

I learnt a lot from my Broadway experience, it was one of the most challenging things I will probably ever have to do in my entire life, because it was eight shows a week - live singing with really hard choreography - and the spontaneity, you don't know what's going to happen.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Probably my first memory of theatre, the first one I guess that had an impact on me was when I saw my very first panto with my Primary School. I think just going there and experience that for the first time, being so young, it's something that's actually stuck with me right up until now. And to think back and to sort of remember that magic and that first little hint of it was brilliant.

The theater's a live thing, and film is, to some extent, a discipline where you're putting everything together and trying to execute something exactly. You do it away from people and then you present it at the end.

I think every show I do, whether I am doing eight shows a week of a Broadway show... I think, "that's a show I'll never get back"... I go home at night and I think to myself, "that was my favorite".

The theater itself is so archaic and old fashioned, that it doesn't really matter to me whether it's on Avenue D or at the Helen Hayes Theater. What's the difference? It's still a very nostalgic form. Also, it means you're knowingly walking into a room where there's actors. I feel it's very embarrassing. Because, you know, they're right there. You always think like, they can see you, and I think it's mortifying, frankly, and I hate to sit near the front, where you feel they actually might see you. It's too ... it's too live.

I think theatre reminds us what we're doing as actors, because every night and every matinee day, you have an audience telling you what's working and what's not. And that's very good for us as actors to hone our skills.