Gallant Quotes

I love Broadway. I love live performing. It's really spiritual when you can get to interact with people, and they actually affect how your show goes.

Acting is like free therapy! Trying to make people laugh or cry can be inspiring.

I think I'm more entertainer than musician. I like to get with the crowd, make this night special for them.

A live performance is the same no matter what genre it is. Wrestling, rock 'n roll, hosting, acting - it's the same thing.

The Angels shows are really intense. We play for a couple hours at a time. They're very theatrical and full of audience interaction and emotion. I've seen a lot of people crying and stuff. It's a little bit like church, but it's very secular.

Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.

Three times during the show the drums are lifted over the audience - I go up and out, right, left and back.

If it's total freedom, I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer, with the performer projecting something he doesn't even have to play.

Immediate, simultaneous connection between the audience and a performer is crucial to me. It's why I do what I do. Other things, like recording, are satisfying, but they're not the same. I love the connection I get with the audience when I'm sitting behind that piano.

Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.

What happens is, when I perform, I'm somewhere else. I go back in time and get in touch with who I really am. I forget my troubles, my worries.

I love playing to people and seeing them react.

I can't even tell anyone how it feels when I'm acting, I don't mean to say that I don't have to try. But there's something in my heart that explodes, and I feel like I understand. When I'm acting, I feel like so in control and so centered. This is something that I solely get from acting and music. It's like love itself.

I thought music could take you to a place where you didn't even feel ownership of it, you just felt lucky you were there. It's like church without God, or something. It's about feeling, hope and catharsis and things that are nurturing.

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.

I definitely love performing live because there are moments of spontaneity. And as much as you're performing on stage, I feel like the audience is performing, too.

You can do stuff onstage that you can't do offstage. You can be angry as hell and enraged and get away with it onstage, but not off.

I've always wanted to do, oddly enough, a live variety show, but only with a live audience.

The idea of audiences becoming part of the show is, I think, where theatre is going.

Musicals allow a depth of emotion that you don't get in another form of acting, the chord changes, the lyrics really affect people, so that in two hours, you've forgotten about things.

Every performer I talk to will, with different words, talk about the sanctity of a good standup show, how it can really feel spiritual. When everybody is laughing, fixed on the same thing, you feel like you transcend yourself.

There's nothing like performing in front of a live crowd and just having people literally react to whatever it is you do, and there's nothing better than when you get that connection with the audience.

I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.

Within a safe environment, the theater, you can have a big ride, big ups and downs, intensity, warmth, humanity, laughs, tears - you want that full range of emotion.

I've said this many times: Rock 'n' roll is this magnet for dysfunctional people who only know how to communicate through the medium of a live show.