Theatre Directors Quotes

All drama teachers are very effusive, very emotionally open, very big, and gesticulate a lot, and are very physical. Those people don't work in banks and they don't work for pharmaceutical companies. They teach drama, or they may be theatre directors. That's why I love people who are openly gay in theatre, because they have license to do what they like, and there's a kind of artistic liberal tolerance thing that goes on.

For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: 'Chicago,' 'Wicked' and 'Anything Goes.'

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.

Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Theatre de Complicite, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind, these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.

Show-wise, I love 'Little Shop' and 'Big River', 'Avenue Q,' and 'Spring Awakening'.

When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.

On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.

In Europe, it is not so unusual for directors to move between opera, theatre, and film, and I have at least three girlfriends I can think of who have directed in all three genres.

Hal Prince and Andrew actually asked me if I would be interested in continuing with 'Phantom', but obviously I was under contract to 'Les Mis' by then.