Quotes About Theater Audience

Enjoy reading and share 45 famous quotes about Theater Audience with everyone.

“The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the authors and the directors intent.”
— Joan Fontaine —

“[ ... ] a given text may seem fictional or actual depending on the context in which we encounter it. The same is true for oral performances. [Thomas] Pavel takes the example of a theatrical scene wherein an actor mimics the gestures of a priest and pretends to bless the audience. There is nothing effective about this blessing in most contexts, but it can become effective in certain circumstances: imagine, for example, a dictatorship in which religion is banned and in which a theater audience, having kept the old faith, experiences the actor's gesture as authentic, transforming this fictional scene in a scene of real life.”

— Pierre Bayard

“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”

— SÃ¸ren Kierkegaard

“The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.”

— Paul Auster

“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!”

— Adam Pascal

“Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.”

— Richard Foreman

“As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.”

— Richard Foreman

“I prefer theater, but I love to do films, and I prefer theater primarily because I've done more. I know less about movies. You can't lie in either medium. The wonderful thing is that the camera, just like an audience, is made out of skin - because celluloid is skin.”

— Amanda Plummer

“The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you're going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theater because there are no second takes in front of a live audience.”

— Sanaa Lathan

“I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.”

— Shane Black

“I love festivals because they seem like more of an artsy, supportive attitude - which benefits a more theatrical performer sometimes with having theater and other non-club venues, as well as the audience being filled with other artists. It's nice to be with other comics, as usually at other road gigs, I'm solo for the most part.”

— Maria Bamford

“As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or not watch the film.”

— Michael Mann

“I've done a lot of theater, and I know that it's a different audience each time who doesn't know the story, and we have to tell it.”

— Courtney B. Vance

“In Elizabethan England or classical Athens ... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.”

— Diane Paulus

“I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.”

— Julian Ovenden

“I've studied theater since high school. Of course, it's a different story altogether being on Broadway, but it's still theater, and you have to be in front of a live audience, and that's very exciting. It's something I've definitely wanted to do, but I got involved in movies and television, and then it became a luxury to get back on the stage.”

— Dennis Haysbert

“I think theater and church are so relatable because it's traditional call-and-response in the way that an audience interacts with the actors.”

— Danielle Brooks

“You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater.”

— Abhishek Bachchan

“I don't any longer make any quality judgement between theater and cinema. They are different experiences for the audience, and they also are for the actors - although they have a lot in common.”

— Ian Mckellen

“You have in Vegas the most heterogeneous audience you're gonna get anywhere in the country. In Boston, Chicago, Miami, you know who goes to the theater. In Vegas, you have people who only see one theater show a year, and it's in Vegas.”

— Penn Jillette

“The industry has to have the audience in order to make these films. So it's a serious thing - how do you get people to leave their houses and go to the theater?”

— Peter Jackson

“If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it.”

— Carlisle Floyd

“I'll eventually go back to theater because the feeling of being on stage where you have the audience right there, you can't replace that with anything.”

— Sanaa Lathan

“And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.”

— Diablo Cody

“At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.”

— Diane Paulus

“I'm not a huge fan of 3-D, though. Honestly, I think that movies are an immersive experience and an audience experience. There's nothing like seeing a film with 500 people in a theater. And there's something about putting on 3-D glasses that makes it a very singular experience for me. Suddenly I'm not connected to the audience anymore.”

— Todd Phillips

“Cary Grant was wonderful to work with on stage. He would move downstage, so that as he looked at me the audience had to look at me, too. He knew a lot about the theater and how to move around. He was very secure.”

— Fay Wray

“When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.”

— Franz Grillparzer

“The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.”

— Virginia Postrel

“I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response.”

— David Anders

“In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective
and to any number of subjective points of view
and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.”

— Ed Murray

“The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.”

— Joan Fontaine

“When the theater is gothic it matches the sensibility of the show. It's also very intimate. The audience is very close to the performers. The show is scary and the scary stuff always works best with an intimacy with the audience. And the show is erotic, and I think erotic always works best when it's close to the audience, as well.”

— Frank Wildhorn

“To be able to actually sit in a theater and watch people get off on anything that I had a part in, is just thrilling. When you work in television, it's an isolating experience. You rarely ever get to watch it with an audience.”

— Marti Noxon

“Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.”

— Bill Tilden

“The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.”

— Nick Blaemire

“When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.”

— Suzanne Farrell

“The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.”

— Viola Spolin

“Even as a child, I just leaned towards the scary. I remember seeing Halloween, for the first time. I snuck into the theater and was sitting there with a group of friends in the front row, and I turned back to look at the audience. They were screaming and interacting with the screen and were interacting with Jamie Lee Curtis as she walked through that horrible night. I just thought, "I want to do that."”

— Kevin D. Williamson

“Whether I'm directing live action or animation, my responsibility is the same. I have an audience sitting in a theater with their popcorn, and I've got to show them a good time and make them feel something.”

— Lee Unkrich

“Nowadays, especially in big commercial films it's much easier for the audience, and they tend to get spoonfed. It's much more interesting to me, people leave the theater and they start asking themselves questions and find their own moral compass about what these characters have been doing.”

— Michael Fassbender

“I can stand at the back of the theater and watch an audience laugh, cry, and be moved by what I do. I can entertain people around the world. It's nice when you can give someone that gift.”

— Jerry Bruckheimer

“With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.”