Lee Grant Quotes

The hope is that in rediscovering 'Chicago,' audiences will rediscover what theater was. It was sophisticated, complicated, adult.

I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.'

I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces.

You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean.

I wouldn't be here if it weren't for 'Show Boat.' The kind of theater I chose to be involved in is completely a direct reflection of what 'Show Boat' made possible.

I remember when I was doing 'The Crucible' on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, 'Let's make sure we remember this.'

I think of the Roundabout as my musical theater family here in New York City.

There is already huge public interest in stage musicals.

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.

My grandmother took me to a lot of theater. I was exposed to performance quite a bit - everything from Broadway to off-Broadway and dance and music as well. I was very lucky that way. It was a very rich childhood.

I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.

People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.

Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.

I'm obsessed with musicals.

Moliere and Arthur Miller affected me at a very young age. In adulthood, I became overwhelmed by Chekhov. Those are my big theatrical influences.

'Hamilton' has restored my faith in theater.

I wasn't a musical-theater kid. We went to plays at school and took field trips to see Shakespeare. And that really sparked that fire for me, and so that's still going, and I haven't given up on it.

I went to a really small school, and it had a really small theater department. They didn't talk about Broadway. I learned about it through watching the Tony Awards.

I'm not a fan of musicals. Never have been.

Theater originated with technology. People forget that.

I've always had an affinity for writers who have a poetry background, so I always liked Tennessee Williams.

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 had started doing small community theater shows in my hometown of Cleveland. I did a lot of shows there before I met this director who told me, 'Listen, I really think you could be on Broadway.' And I was like, 'No, that's crazy.' I didn't believe it... I was 9, maybe 8 years old at the time, and I was like, 'No. No way.'

I'm a super theater nerd.

Broadway was very vital back in the '20s. There were probably close to hundreds of productions that opened up through the course of the year and through the course of a Broadway season.