Theater History Quotes

I was one of those people who watched and videotaped the Tonys every year and kept a highlight reel every year. I saw every Broadway show as a kid.

When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.

I was the first African-American woman to play Maggie in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' It was at the Virginia State Theatre, and we turned Richmond upside down.

Theater originated with technology. People forget that.

Broadway has changed tremendously from the early days when the shows were referred to as musical comedies. Musical Theater is now a more expanded art form. Back then, singer/actors were not the norm. From the 60's to now, it is necessary to do it all to be a consummate Broadway performer.

I do wish somewhere there was a film of our stage production of 'My Fair Lady.'

Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.

Shakespeare I love, but for an English graduate, I'm incredibly badly read.

I don't know how it is now but the assistant stage manager had to understudy several parts. You had to be ready to go on at any time if the actor couldn't make it to the play. I didn't think anything of it.

I did a couple of little Off-Broadway things, but my first Broadway show was A History Of The American Film, written by Chris Durang. Swoosie Kurtz was one of the stars. It was a wonderful show. It closed in 40 performances. I think it was kind of ahead of its time.

I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which was in Carnegie Hall, which itself was exciting - just to walk into it.

I did my Doctorate on the House Un-American Activities Committee's effect on the American theater.

At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.

I grew up idolizing Madeline Kahn and Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett, Ruth Gordon, Rosalind Russell, Amy Irving, women who were stylish and real actresses who did real work and could not be replaced with anyone else. You cannot cast anyone else in Madeline Kahn's roles.

Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers.

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.

Theater was something that I always wanted to study.

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

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.

Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.

In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it.

There's a real passing down in the theater, almost ad nauseam. You have to listen to older people talk about their experience, but it makes you very aware of what has come before you or what is coming after you - that you're a part of a link in a chain. It's not all about you.

What I learned through my research is that the word 'actor,' specifically in reference to those who performed in plays, came about in the late 1500s as a non-gendered word. It applied to all people, regardless of anatomical sex or gender identity.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.