Emanuel Azenberg Quotes

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

At this point the theater America is in such a precarious place.

The modern economics of the theater is such that we write plays with fewer and fewer characters.

I miss Broadway, what little there is on Broadway now.

I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.

Maybe all theatre is going to be irrelevant for all time.

Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!

All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater.

I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant.

Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don't think that's a good trend for the theater at all.

A play is a hard thing, particularly in L.A. It's less expensive than in New York, but there's also less of a commitment to people doing plays than in New York. So it's a strange battle.

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.

I've always seen TV as... it didn't occupy the same rarefied space as literature, but it's art you can use day to day. I've never been hung up on where it figures in the hierarchy of learning.

It's heartbreaking to see theater people be forced to accept the business side of show business.

I think that there's a difference between being an entertainer and being an artist.

For me, it's important to ask what are you making, and what's the public's relationship to that. And I say public relationship because I don't really care so much about any sort of reception.

Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.

I don't think a film that has no effect on people or society is a good film.

When an audience takes to a song and it becomes older, in a way it changes it entirely. And then the journey just begins.

The truth is, a lot of people go to drag shows, really, for very light entertainment, and I think sometimes maybe we don't even give the audiences enough credit as to what they'd be down for.

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

What was so lovely about 'O.J.' and 'This Is Us' to a certain extent is that I got a chance to surprise people.

Comics were always the lowest rung on the ladder, front of cloth at the Royal Variety Performance. What that means is you're only there so Take That can set up behind the curtains.

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.