Top 1200 Broadway Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

When I saw 'Legally Blonde' on Broadway, I rang my agent and said 'I want to be seen for this,' but the rest weren't big choices, really. 'Hedda Gabler' was a phone call offering it to me, and as I've said before quite embarrassingly, I didn't know the play, so I didn't sit there thinking 'I would now like to tackle Ibsen.'

Broadway's a lot of work, don't get me wrong. It's eight shows a week. You hardly ever see the sunset. I remember when I left, I was like, 'Oh! The sun's setting! I haven't seen that in a year!' Singing eight shows a week is hard.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

If I were to talk to my younger self, I would say, 'Girl, you're gonna be on Broadway one day.' I sometimes think about my younger self knowing that and how ridiculously she's sobbing somewhere, so I would love to tell her that it's all going to happen.

My father was Abe Burrows, who was a Broadway legend. 'Guys and Dolls,' 'How to Succeed,' 'Cactus Flower,' '40 Karats,' 'Can-Can,' 'Happy Hunting,' 'Reclining Figure,' it goes on. He was a legend, and when I was growing up, I was Abe Burrows' kid. That was my self-esteem.

Maybe for others it was difficult to find a role that suited my type. But I never thought of myself as a type. I really thought I could play anything, quite frankly. And I have. Especially in the theater, which is where I came from. And I may go back to soon, as a matter of fact. To Broadway.

Singing is more of a hobby than really something I want to do for a career. But I love musical theater, so I'm hoping I can go back to it and do a role on Broadway for a few weeks. That would be a dream come true. My dream role would be Roxie in 'Chicago.'

If I do what I really want to do, I'm not going to do a typical commercial Broadway show, so I'm going to write what I want to write.

I was just on Broadway for four months, and the amount of fan mail that arrived at the theater was just overwhelming. I mean, I had no idea! I guess people suddenly had access to me and knew where to find me, so they got me there, and I was amazed.

I didn't think it was my dream to be on Broadway; it just sort of became that, and then it just became me wanting it more and more and more.

The whole cast and creative team were definitely aware of the 'This is the death of Broadway!' kind of thing about 'SpongeBob,' but we've been really ready to change people's minds. I'm really proud of being part of something that took the most creative route to a commercial entity.

The good thing about Broadway is that you don't have to worry about an airdate. It gets done when it gets done.

I was in New York doing musicals in the theater and on Broadway before 'Orange,' so people always ask, 'Are you ever going to get to sing? Does she even sing?' But people who know me know I actually do sing.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it's a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world!

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

I grew up here in New York City and New Jersey, performing on Broadway shows, surrounded by some of my closest friends from the LGBT community. My father, a minister from New Jersey, shaped my view that love is love, that we are all equal.

Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running.

I've really had a great career. It's been part fortune and part my own choices that steered my own career into playing the great roles that I've played on stage in Australia and at the National and West End in London and on Broadway.

The play I was doing [on a Broadway ], I was playing an obnoxious, outspoken kid, so [the director James Lapine ] saw me do the play, and he was like, "That's what I'm looking for." I tested for the part [in Life With Mikey]. Back then, I used to do screen tests. I mean, they still do every once in awhile, but it was a big deal.

I was 23, and I was in L.A. while on hiatus [as an understudy] from Biloxi Blues on Broadway. The guy that I'd been studying with had been fired for horsing around on stage with Matthew Broderick, and they were really anxious to get me back into the play. So I was in a great situation, and at the time, I definitely wasn't thinking about television

It was during my first trip to America in 1953 - thats when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.

I booked my first national tour of a Broadway show right out of college. It was the tap show, '42nd Street.' I had only been tap dancing for three years when I booked that show.

I think... you know, collaboration, in general - no matter movies, television or Broadway - is offering of what you can bring to the table and also fighting what you think the important battles are. Not everything is going to make it in there. Not everything is going to work. You have to collaborate. And you have to be a good listener.

There was a perception that reality-show people are just mere personalities, that they don't have real talent, and I worked real hard to change peoples' minds, one show at a time, and proved a lot of people wrong. I'm proud I was the first to do that for 'Idol' on Broadway!

An actor can do a play on Broadway for three years. Every night he's expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way. He has developed a technique to convey those feelings so that he can get the ideas across. Or a musician may not want to play that damn music at all, but he has a booking and has to do it.

I am honored to be named Godfather for Norwegian Bliss. This incredible ship and all the innovative activities onboard, from the race track to Broadway shows, perfectly reflect the energy and excitement of our morning show, and we are looking forward to bringing our loyal listeners along for this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Imagination bound us stronger than love. Within its limitless borders we launched ships and love affairs, discovered lost worlds, made buildings and babies, found husbands, wrote letters and Broadway plays. We made ourselves up everyday.

In the Broadway world, I've always wanted to play Valjean in 'Les Mis', since I've already played Gavroche. I'd also like to play the Phantom of the Opera, but I haven't really thought about any film characters. You've got to have a whole lot of training for the Phantom role, vocally.

The hope is they would like to bring it to Broadway next year, so we'll see that's to come in the end of the finance year and everybody else and also real estate and what theaters are available at the time but I would like to come back with it.

I wish, mainly, that I could have a job and work all the time and also not have to leave my kids. If there was a way to clone myself and be at every parent-teacher meeting and be there to put my kids to bed every single night and also star on Broadway, that's what I would do.

I'm very optimistic about the future, because... Okay, with Audra McDonald, even just on Broadway, they cast her in shows that are usually not played by African-American women, so she's very inspiring to me just because of that, you know what I mean?

I've been working very hard off-off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway and doing little films and really sweating my butt off in tiny little black boxes.

I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.

When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.

One of the first memories I have was watching Whoopi Goldberg perform her one-woman show on Broadway on HBO. She moved seamlessly through an array of spirited and soul-stirring characters, each one holding a mirror up to me and allowing me in many ways to see a reflection of myself on screen.

I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing.

I would love to play, perhaps not exactly Mimi in 'Rent,' but someone like her. Perhaps not on Broadway, but I think I feel like a musical is in my future. I sing, although I'm not Whitney Houston up in here. I'm a little bit shy about my singing, but I did it in school at Juilliard.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.

In some ways, what 'Hamilton' has done for Broadway shows - what it has done for the interpretation of history and how it fused all these worlds together into this modern, contemporary, hip-hop field, and delivered it in such an incredible way - we were inspired to do a similar thing for ballroom dancing and for dance shows in general.

When you're starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands.

It was during my first trip to America in 1953 - that's when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.

I started traveling by myself as early as 5 to see my dad. I'd go to Toronto or Los Angeles, depending on what show he was doing, but most often New York, and we would hang out, and he'd take me to museums and Broadway plays. The ones that had the biggest impact on me were the George C. Wolfe productions.

I think we sublimated our Broadway desires by doing theater in Hollywood - not on stage but by doing the movies of 'Chicago' and 'Hairspray' and also musicals on TV. We did Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella' and 'Gypsy' and 'Annie.' Even 'Smash' was like doing theater.

I saw 'Hairspray' at the Pantages in L.A. It came to the Pantages right before I did the movie, and just being in New York sometimes and seeing the marquees and everything like that, I'm like, 'I really, really have to go experience a Broadway play.'

Say the average arena is 20,000 people. You're in the very center of that arena, and you're playing to the worst seat in the house up there. So everything is very big, very large. It's like a very violent form of Broadway in a 20x20 ring.

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 like film, and I like Broadway; I just love performing, so whatever God has for me, I'll be happy to just try it and see what happens because no matter what, if I'm performing, I'll be happy.

I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.

On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.

I had started doing small community theater shows in my hometown of Cleveland. I did a lot of shows there before I met this director who told me, 'Listen, I really think you could be on Broadway.' And I was like, 'No, that's crazy.' I didn't believe it... I was 9, maybe 8 years old at the time, and I was like, 'No. No way.'

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

I went to Hollywood to test for Martha Ivers and I thought I was going to play the part that Van Heflin played.But they wanted me to play the part of Barbara Stanwyck's husband, so I played that. Then when I finished the movie, I went back to Broadway and did another flop.

I was the illegitimate child of the legitimate theater. I had no training. I came from downtown rock and roll, and when I came in and auditioned for the Broadway revival of 'Hair,' I had no eyebrows - kind of a Bowie-esque glimmer kid. And it was hard representing the flower power era when we were stone cold punks.

My father's Alfred Newman - born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he's one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter - went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.

I've studied theater since high school. Of course, it's a different story altogether being on Broadway, but it's still theater, and you have to be in front of a live audience, and that's very exciting. It's something I've definitely wanted to do, but I got involved in movies and television, and then it became a luxury to get back on the stage.

When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.

I'm kind of happy to know there may be some kid or teenager now who might never have had the chance to see my Broadway performance, but gets a taste for what it might have been like now, because they can see Clint Eastwood's film."

What's the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit - taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington - has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.