New York Theater Quotes

I love working in New York theater.

I know it affected me when I saw certain actors growing up. I had a drama teacher that would take us to see plays in New York, and it was seeing James Earl Jones and Raul Julia - I mean, this guy comes from the place my mother comes from. He's doing Shakespeare right now, and it doesn't seem to matter that he has an accent.

I spent a lot of time in the trenches in New York doing a lot of off-off-off Broadway theater.

The Broadway audiences are very vocal and seem very engaged. For certain shows, especially with a show like 'The Heiress,' the audience's reactions sound like 'The Jerry Springer Show' sometimes. That seems to be a very New York thing. Oh, there's also the entrance round of applause here, which we don't get too much in London.

I'm a New York girl. I come out of New York theater.

And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater.

The play I did on Broadway a couple of seasons ago started out of town and it moved its way into New York because of the experience that we had out of town.

I did a lot of small black-box theater in New York when I was starting out. I'd get a group of actors together to do workshops and readings. And I ended up directing three or four productions.

For your first musical in New York, to go to Broadway and be nominated for a Tony is a dream come true.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

In Chicago it's really a case of the play's the thing - people are just so happy to be acting, you know? We were all actors - not like in New York or Los Angeles, where everyone says they are actors but they are actually waiting tables and hustling for spots in commercials.

'Yosemite' opened doors for me in the New York theater community in amazing ways. There's a whole world of fearless young theater makers here who put shows together on a shoestring budget and with gigantic hearts.

When I was about seven, I started touring the globe as part of New York's La MaMa theater company - without my parents!

I was in a Broadway musical called Big Time Buck Wright.The play didn't make it but I was a success. It lasted six days but I sung four songs and there were critics, seriously, in New York who said that my part was perfect. So I can beat Joe Frazier singing.

My father went to college for drama in Pittsburgh, and so did my mother, and then my mother was a steadily working New York theater actress. They kind of quit when I was born. They did that for, like, 10 years before they had kids and then I was born and they were not into that lifestyle for kids.

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

The idea that the Tony committee and the New York theater community as a whole have embraced 'Billy Elliot' is very, very exciting.

My mother's whole family had been from the theater, really. Because I grew up in Hollywood, I wasn't that interested in Hollywood. But the New York theater was completely exotic and fabulous to me.

Look at the shows that are really successful on Broadway. They're musicals. They're things that a woman will pick out the tickets for, or a man will buy the tickets with a woman in mind. It's a date. It's boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife. That's what the theater in New York has become.

I've always wanted to do theater in Chicago. Chicago is a big theater town-and, in some ways, I think this city is savvier and smarter than New York. Sometimes, I think it's a little too chic to go to theater in New York these days.

It was always my dream to be a New York theater actor. I never thought I was pretty enough to be on camera.

I have a great admiration for English actors and actresses and have used them at every opportunity over the years, but now I won't have to import them to New York.

Mother was so good that I was defeated even before I started to be an actress. I thought I could never make it unless I spent years in the Actors Studios, went on the blacklist and lived in New York, as she did.

I'm a theater guy at heart; I love the theater. I was lucky enough to spend a good decade and a half in the New York theater community.

I had kind of an attitude, which was not uncommon in New York. Theater people who went to Hollywood to do sitcoms were selling out. That was the attitude. And I didn't really relish the idea of being cast in a sitcom, because I shared that attitude.