Roger Rees Quotes

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

Theater is a living creature. It takes a while to break in, like a new pair of shoes.

As an actor to watch an audience of people howl together in a single mind as a result of work you've done together with friends is a privilege.

But theatre is always a difficult experience.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers.

I don't look back. I look forward and plan new shows. That's really feeding the most important part of working in the theater.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don't get to do in real life.

I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium.

I think any actor would agree that you can't replace theater. It's immediate. You have the energy of the crowd and every single night it's different.

I think theater is powerful. The best experiences I had in the theater are more powerful than the best experiences I had in movies.

People often argue about this. Obviously one of the skills in performance is acting, and you can't expect every Romeo to really be in love with their Juliet!

But, yes, I learned everything working in theater. I learned the importance of community - I was constantly going to play readings, stand-up nights, improv. nights.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.

I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.

So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

I love the rehearsal process in the theatre, and the visceral sense of contact and communication with a live audience.

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are.

I've done so much theater, and yet I never had an experience like 'The Normal Heart.' We could feel the reaction of the audience every night. It was visceral.

One of the things I love about directing is I love actors, because no matter how complex they are, once you get down to working and talking to them and the toughest guy will want you to open them up and he wants to show you stuff he was afraid to show anybody before.

Theater has always been most important to my psyche.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.