Gary Cole Quotes

Live performances always feel like such a moment with all of the costumes and theatrics.

There's something about a live theater performance: You can't fake it.

My mentor, [Ingmar] Bergman, when we worked on stage, he said you can't convince a thousand people at the big stage where we were working. You can't convince everybody, but just pick one every night that you perform for and make sure that he or she will have an experience that alters their life in a more positive way. So, just one every night. That's worth all the struggle and screaming.

Theater is such its own living, breathing animal. You do a show every night, but it's different every night. Being on stage, you're experiencing a journey.

I didn't know I wanted to go into entertainment, but I knew I wanted to be on stage when I was about seven. I saw a play, like most kids do, at a children's theater in Cleveland, and I just saw them up there, and I thought, 'that's where I want to be.'

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.

I'm interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance; that will get everybody in the theater.

When you see a band, you want to see characters.

It doesn't matter if you're the best wrestler in the world and can do every move perfectly; if you don't connect with the crowd or sell well or have good promos, nobody cares.

There's nothing like performing for a live audience.

I've always been obsessed with being on stage and putting shows together.

When I saw 'Chess' in London, I thought it was horrible. It was so static. People were coming down front and just facing the audience, singing.

It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.

If it's a 50-seat theater, I am neurotic about whether I'm doing an honest performance. Sometimes I walk away happy enough with it. You know, it can always be better, but sometimes I'll walk away distraught, feeling like I missed the pulse of the character that evening.

You can get bored up there on stage, night after night. But it's an open forum where you can get away with almost anything, so you might as well do it.

There are some actors who come alive in front of a crowd, and if you've cast it right, there's an energy between cast and audience that can be exhilarating for both parties, then enjoyed by the audience at home.

I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'

I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.

Janet Carroll and Robert Pine, Chris Pine's dad, were in my first play, and they were so astonishingly good, I felt it raised my game instantly.

Projection of sound gives the stage a life different from real life. As actors and interpretive artists, we must not only be able to know the attitude of the script, we must also make ourselves heard - without amplification.

I was 17 when I first acted on stage. I was a part of an Urdu adaptation of 'Spartacus' in the titular role.

Once you step on stage, the people are actually looking to be transformed. That's why they showed up; that's why they spent some money. And great performances do that.

We enjoy playing small shows, big shows, whatever. There's the energy of the visual production, and all that stuff starts to happen, so when you see it come to life, it's pretty exciting.

If the only reason to be on stage communicating with people is to tell them a joke and make them laugh, that seems thin for me. That has a place - I don't think it should stop happening - but for me, I don't know. I just don't.

I think the first role I ever played was the Magic Carpet in 'Aladdin Jr.' I did a lot of tap dancing and not a lot of dialogue. But I loved it so much, and I loved the way people responded to the characters.