Variety Performance Quotes

I think that kids need to grow up watching what I grew up watching - great entertainment; you know, Judy Garland and all these musicals that bring song and dance and acting all together in a polished way.

There's something about a variety show, I think, that disarms us as consumers of something. We're laughing, and there's this sense of anything goes, anything could happen.

I don't really want to be known as just the puppet girl or just a singing ventriloquist. I want to be known as the performer, singer, ventriloquist, actress, Broadway star, all of it. I want do it all.

It's hard to do a variety show. It's hard to do all that small talk and make it sound real.

So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!

For me, making the show work was getting belly laughs - like most variety artists. But the straight actor believes you fix your performance in rehearsal and that's it.

When we first did 'Big Night Out,' there was no chance of someone doing a little show in a pub then being on telly. There was a little Oxbridge route in and an old-fashioned variety route.

I've done great theatre, great films and had a lot of opportunities in television. I also love to sing, and I've been able to do that once or twice in the television shows.

Well, I play Jews and parrots. Parrots are how I've branched out.

I don't call myself an actor, I call myself an entertainer, because I don't just do one thing.

I've been doing acting since I was 6 years old, and I don't know how to do anything besides act and sing. Back in the day, you had to do it all - you had to sing, dance, and act. I'm from the old school where that is what I was trained to do, and that's what I am expected to do, so it's weird when people ask me to choose.

I look at myself more as really an entertainer. Yes, I act, but there are other things that I can do.

Variety shows didn't disappear; it was the caliber of the artists, the classic vaudevillians that have passed on. They are gone, so there's a different caliber performer that's come along that hasn't had the time to work in the small clubs and get the experience.

I want to be like Robin Williams, really. It's all the different characters he does, all the different voices.

I'm a song and dance girl. I can act enough to get by. But that's the limit of my talents.