Fred Schneider Quotes

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

I can think of only two or three songs out of hundreds I've recorded that I performed as originally written. I like to become intimate with the material and change it to suit me.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I get a lot of joy out of covering other people's songs, and, at my best, I think I bring something a little new to a lot of them.

When doing a remake, you're on safer territory. You know you cannot go absolutely wrong. But how right it goes depends on various factors like casting and the way you adapt the film.

It's 2019. People aren't going to shows to watch a band play the song exactly like the record.

I take things that already exist and just push them.

Probably 90 percent of the stuff I make has inevitably been done before... Whether it's playing Hamlet, which has been on the go for 400 years, or pieces from the cinematic world that also have been essayed before, I feel released by that.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

I think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.

It's a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that's a good thing.

Some songs depend heavily on the character, but, for the most part, a great song begs for reinterpretation every time it is sung, even when in character.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I think a lot of what you do in acting, and for the most part singing and dancing and everything, is trial and error. It's all about just seeing what works, and if it does, to use it, and if not, to throw it away.

I think that what we were doing with the live musical version of 'Shrek' was taking the ideas and the structure of the movie and not necessarily reinventing it but reimagining it. It is a very different medium to perform.

That person who's going to a concert for a nostalgic reason, we're not really going to placate. We still play three or four hits every night. Now, we don't play them like the record. We try to find new ways to do it.

That makes classical music work, the ability to improvise.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.

I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.

Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.