"The truth is I love musical theatre and always have."
-Idina Menzel
"There's a kid in the middle of nowhere who's sitting there living for Tony performances. Singing and flipping along with the Pippins, and Wickeds, and Kinkys, Matildas, and Mormons's. So we might reassure that kid, and do something to spur that kid, 'cause I promise you, all of us up here tonight, we were that kid."
― Neil Patrick Harris
"Mitchell Maxwell's Maxims
• You have to create your own professional path. There's no longer a roadmap for an artistic career.
• Follow your heart and the money will follow.
• Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you're climbing the ladder you won't know how far you've come.
• Don't define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it's measured by society, is a fleeting condition.
• Affirm your value. Tell the world "I am an artist," not "I want to be an artist."
• You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn't make it happen. Get out there and get involved.
• When you look into the abyss you find your character.
• Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed.
• Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody's face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest.
• No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard.
• If you're going to buck the norm you're going to have to embrace the challenges.
• You have to love the journey if you're going to work in the arts.
• Only listen to people who agree with your vision.
• A little anxiety is good but don't let it become fear, fear makes you inert.
• Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else.
• Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher."
― Mitchell Maxwell
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
-Victor Hugo
"The theatre is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
-Arthur Miller
"The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character."
-Alfred Jarry
"Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once."
-Norman Vincent Peale
"I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me."
-Stephen Sondheim
"I'll eventually go back to theater because the feeling of being on stage where you have the audience right there, you can't replace that with anything."
-Sanaa Lathan
"And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I'd won the lottery."
-Tom Hanks
"The Stories are Centuries old. They shout of discovered love and lost hope, of humor and anguish, of mystery and maidens and tragic farewells. Within three plain walls and a curtain lies a world in which we've never lived. A world we think we know. The Performing Arts are beacons of the times. They reflect the best of us and the worst of us. As they tell their tales, on a stage, shining in the light." - Anonymous
"Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater" - W.R. Inge
"The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation"
-Stella Adler
"All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man" - Bernard Berenson
"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being." - Oscar Wilde
"The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare." - John Berger
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." - Orson Welles
"We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself." - Bertolt Brecht
"Good theater anywhere is good for theater everywhere." - Frank Schneeberger
"The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness." -Tennessee Williams
"I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act." - Orson Welles
"The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you're going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theatre because there are no second takes in front of a live audience."
-Sanaa Lathan
"The theater is who I am - it's where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful."
-Mary-Louise Parker
"Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music."
-George Carlin
"Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances."
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"An actor must never be afraid to make a fool of himself."
― Harvey Cocks
"How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward."
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
"The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart."
― Marsha Norman
"I come from musical theater, and a lot of musical theater is about accepting fantasy. I think it is more about just being open and accepting."
-Amy Adams
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It
"Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in."
―Stephen Sondheim
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That's all for now :) enjoy!
