Broadway Plays Quotes & Sayings

I worked with Ismail Merchant on 'The Mystic Masseur,' I did 'Sakina's Restaurant,' I've done plays, I've been on Broadway, I've done movies, I've done TV ... but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as 'The Daily Show' has. It's the nature of the beast. — Aasif Mandvi

When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them. — Steve Kazee

I go to a lot of plays. I tend to prefer the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway more than the Broadway shows. That's where I see people that I might not know. — Ellen Chenoweth

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. — Ken Ludwig

I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever. — Michael Emerson

The commercial theatre may still be considered one of New York's primary tourist attractions, but ... there is no longer an audience for serious Broadway plays ... Perhaps we should acknowledge that, having lost its traditional audience, Broadway can never again be a home for new plays. — Robert Brustein

I was in 27 Broadway plays in a row as a kid, and in between, I learned how to play the horses from the stagehands. — Dick Van Patten

By the time I started writing plays, Broadway was never an expectation, so it's never been central. — Richard Greenberg

Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting. — Yoko Ono

Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet. — Terry Teachout

I've done a lot of Broadway plays, and I'm fortunate they've all been so successful. — John Benjamin Hickey

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream. — Arthur Miller

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff. — Mickey Rourke

I used to do lots of independent films and for a while I was very content living in New York City and doing independent movies and off-Broadway theater. I loved it, I had a really good time doing that, and I worked on a lot of projects that are very dear to my heart, both plays and films. — Jared Harris

Frances McDormand is my favorite actor. I don't know if that's relevant. But she's a person who plays people. In other words, not everything has to be an over-the-top Broadway musical to get my attention, but it certainly helps. — Julie Klausner

We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays. — Arthur Laurents

Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah. — John Lahr

One of the things I find very little of in America - and certainly not on Broadway - are plays with political attitudes. — Michael Lindsay-Hogg

I'm a kid that went to theater school. I thought I was going to be making my living doing plays regionally or in New York or on Broadway, and maybe if I got lucky I would do a movie here or there. — Matt Bomer

I didn't deserve Jeremy's kindness. I knew that. I suppose that was why I always questioned his motivation. In the beginning, every time he'd done something nice for me, I'd searched for a glimpse of evil behind the kindness, some nefarious motivation. After all, he was a monster. He had to be evil. When I'd realized there was nothing bad in Jeremy, I'd latched on to another excuse: that he was good to me because he was stuck with me, because he was a decent guy and maybe even because he felt some responsibility for what his ward had done to me. If he took me to Broadway plays and expensive dinners for two, it was because he wanted to keep me quiet and happy, not because he enjoyed my company. I wanted him to enjoy my company, but couldn't believe in it because I didn't see much in myself to warrant it. — Kelley Armstrong

I'm unable to do the thing that Broadway actors do in plays, sometimes for years. The same exact blocking, the same exact lines. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with that. Every night I'm looking for ways to try something else. — Mike Birbiglia

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. — Marita Golden

In school, when we lived in New Jersey, we went to Broadway a lot, so I saw a lot of Broadway plays, and I just loved being able to see people play a different character and, you know, be able to be themselves at the end of the night. So, I've always wanted to do it. — Jordin Sparks

I think I can work anywhere, but you don't get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York. — Daniel Kehlmann

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental. — Suzan-Lori Parks

I was struck by how life moved so fast, almost cruelly, on Broadway. Fiorello! had fled the Broadhurst to make way for Sail Away, as if it had never existed. I studied each such metamorphosis with contradictory emotions of excitement and loss. With their new marquees and posters and glass-encased displays of fresh photos, the theaters promised a teeming bounty of surprises. But there remained not a shred of their previous tenants, who were gone forever and mourned by no one, perhaps, except me. When shows left the National, I knew they were going on to Broadway or at least to another town on the road. Where did the plays that left New York go? — Frank Rich

I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize. — Dick Van Patten

I went from off-off Broadway. I would direct plays in Baldwin Hills. Almost Tyler Perry-like, really trying to express myself in that and not really knowing how to, knowing acting in story, but not really knowing how to technically hold a camera. — Lee Daniels

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. — Edward Albee

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays. — William Monahan

I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one - I was horrible. I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, "Oh, I gotta do this again." Because I know I can do it. — Scott Raab

But I can't wait to watch the Tonys this Sunday. I'm really glad Broadway is doing so well this year, especially with its straight plays. It's been a wonderful year. — Gregory Harrison