Performance Adaptation Quotes

Things move so quickly on set. When you're about to do another take and you have a minute to figure out what you're doing, you just kind of determine how you're going to do it on the spot.

You perform for a different audience each night. People who don't understand just think that you go out there every night and do the same thing, but you don't - you have to find out who they are and give it to them.

I always have a rule that acting is acting and truth is truth and you just go out there and you do it. But what happens in each medium is that you have other responsibilities. The acting remains the same, but each medium dictates assuming other halves to make the acting work.

I never played a rich man, I never played a prince. And to play a sailor or longshoreman you had to make your dance more eclectic and varied, but still keep it indigenous to your nationality, upbringing, and background.

I think actors always find the dialogue doesn't quite fit, so you always have to play with it.

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

In a live performance, it's a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd's energy. On television, you don't have that.

Each director is different. Clint Eastwood and Chris Nolan are completely different, and I need to adjust to the story and character and the director and just my duty as an actor.

If I'm doing a show on Sunday at 7 P.M., that wouldn't be the same show that I'd do at 11 P.M. on a Saturday - it's a different room at a different time of day with different sensibilities. That doesn't mean you have to compromise your art, but it is communication: you have to know how to talk to people.

When you're in a theater, it's about reaching the back rows. When you have a camera in your face, it's just about knowing the size of the room.

There's always a transition if you go to a new territory or a new company or a new country or wherever because there's different styles and different crowds that you perform in front of. Of course, it always takes a little bit of time to find your groove.

So every time I make a new circuit, a new time around, then I change the show. You can't change the songs; people still want to hear "Lady Sings the Blues" and they still want to hear some of the oldies.

Vegas has the Whitman's Sampler of audiences. They come from all different places, so you have to do some crowd psychology. You have to find the heartbeat of the room. It doesn't shift my jokes, but it shifts my timing and my attention.

If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that's good enough. But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.

When you're in a big theater, you want to reach the very top of the place. Up to the highest seat, so that each person feels like you're talking to them. There's really no difference when you're in a smaller place; you just don't overdo it. It becomes far more personal.

I do the same gig. I might change it a little; I might slow it down if I'm in the South. I talk fast, and they're not used to people talking that fast.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn't come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

At the beginning of the tour, I arrange the live show exactly like the album, but of course from one audience to another, from one venue to another, it can become longer.

Just like my career, I've sung the same songs night after night in so many ways. It's always different because every space is different. I lost my mojo once. It was like Austin Powers. I don't know why or how, but I had to get it back. And I did.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

There are staples to my show. I have to be conscious about switching things up because I know people who saw me last year will say, 'He did that last time.' But if certain things work, they work.

The physicality of a production needs evolution and breath.

If we had an audience to play to, the performance would have gotten too big. Sizing our performances to the camera was an important journey for me at least.

I try to read the audience, see what they're in the mood for.