Innovative Performance Quotes

I just like surprising people. I never want to get to a place where people see that I am in a movie and they go see the movie and they expect a certain performance one way or the other. That is just inherently boring to me.

The minute you start assuming that the audience is very happy to see the same show again, you're dead.

For me as a solo artist, I never want to be a nostalgia act.

You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.

Our music doesn't make many compromises, but we take it into a venue that's larger than people expect.

I was ready to get out of the box and play something a little different than what everybody has seen.

It's not enough to play the old songs; that feels like being your own covers band or something. It's a big release to do new stuff.

I think that Dean Ambrose is driven to create a first-time-ever, unique character that other people in the future can be compared to.

Las Vegas and I both grew up together, and all of a sudden I was doing things that no performer had ever done before.

If what you do in life is perform to open up eyes and minds, to make people laugh, then it better damn well be new! It shouldn't be just a repetitious 'Hey, I'm still here!'

I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. What I wanted to give audiences for the few minutes that I thought my career would last was something unique.

When Orson Welles was acting in 'Compulsion,' the director Richard Fleischer let him just take over and direct the courtroom scenes. To be able to see Welles - who knew more about directing than anyone - direct himself and the other actors, it was unbelievable and unforgettable.

I think Joan Rivers is such an untapped legend that people just don't appreciate, because they grew up with her on QVC, or they grew up with her on E!, or they grew up watching her do the things that in their minds the more prestigious comics wouldn't have taken or done.

I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

I'm particularly impressed by the creation of the character of Spock, which really was Leonard Nimoy's singular creation. He used everything he had.

People started bringing their own personal work to 'Nightgowns,' and that's really when it started to become a really distinctive show.

I would love to be one of those fellows who combine formal and folk music approaches.

I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.

In the '80s, 'Dreamgirls' was our 'Hamilton.' It was cutting-edge, and it was what made me want to do theater.

I'm one of those actors who's going to have to create a space for themselves. It's very easy to be the young Tom Cruise, because Hollywood knows what to do with you. But if you're someone who's bringing someone slightly left of center to the table, you're not a sure thing.

I see no end to the possibility and the potential of Adam Lambert. He's a fabulous performer, and I think it would be very interesting to do something with him.

I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.

I didn't mean for it to cause such a furor, but I was the first guy to ever do the national anthem with a guitar. Everyone else had the big brass band. Nowadays it's tracks that they sing to, but in my day, we had no tracks. And I was the only orchestra that I knew that was the best orchestra and that was me and my guitar.

'Hamilton' is a game-changer for the musical theater genre. It's moved the art form forward so much and redefined so many things about what we do in theater, so it's pretty hard to oversell it.

It has endless possibilities, and but what we do with our arrangements, we move the borders of cello playing and discover new ways of new techniques of cello playing.