Theatrical Magic Quotes

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV.

Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.

Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.

Any actor worth his salt is looking for truth, the core of truth of the particular situation he is portraying, of that play. The playwright, the actors and the audience, that's what we're all there seeking. When it's working, time is destroyed. Sometimes 'Moon,' a play of four hours, would go by in a snap of the fingers.

Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.

I think it's so incredibly special to be able to try to recapitulate that feeling I had when I was sitting in that theater, as a 7-year-old. It's an extraordinary job. I'm incredibly lucky.

There's a romance and power to live theater.

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?

The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.

The thing I find really special in performance is that there is this slightly mystical thing that takes over when you're responding to a crowd and engaging in people's imaginations collectively in a room. I've always thought that one of the most incredible things about being alive is going to see some kind of performance like that.

During a performance of 'Blood Brothers' in 1990, I forgot to sing. I was so moved by what my co-star Kiki Dee was doing, that I completely missed my cue.

The three of us acting was truly one of the best experiences I've ever had. I really look forward to the days when all three of us shoot together, because the sparks really fly.

I randomly took an acting class in undergrad and was reading a monologue from 'Lemon Sky' by Lanford Wilson, and I felt such a connection to the material and then to the audience as I was doing it. This electric current ran through the author, me and the audience, and I felt connected in a way that rarely happens. I was hooked.

I think that if Shakespeare had had access to CGI, he would have used it. Imagine Lear conjuring the storm and the lightning.

There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.

The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors, and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.

What I enjoy most with acting is when it's a good scene with one or two other actors, and you feel a strong connection, and you don't know how you're going to respond, and everybody is listening to each other and getting affected by each other, and even though you've rehearsed it many times, it feels like it's happening right now.

One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up, is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.

Theater is my temple and my religion and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe together.

I think acting is magic. If I tell you all about myself it will spoil it.

The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest in theatre is- that you can be watching this thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part that I'm looking for, that sort of added dimension.

Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.

There can be moments onstage - but sometimes in a movie, too - where you just feel you're in a golden space. You're in this strange world where everything you do makes sense. And it's funny: the audience is right in it with you, and the other actors, and you get these rare moments of feeling at one with something. You hear voices in your head.