Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was starting, I was working with actors who came up through the rep system, and they understood the discipline required: you were never late for rehearsal, you were never not ready to go on, you were always prepared; it was about showing respect to the rest of the company.
Next time I do a play, I want to go out of town. I don't like the idea of opening in New York. I don't have to do theatre, but if you're going to do it, you should do it well. These days, everything has to be up and running in five minutes. As a result, the rehearsal time is missing.
For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.
I would say my favorite was just the beginning of the movie like doing all the rehearsal stuff. It's been amazing to see the rest of it happen but it happens so piecemeal. And Edgar sort of has the whole movie edited in his head already, so we're just sort of matching to what he has.
I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don't really rehearse.
When I go into rehearsal rooms and meet with bands, they're genuinely excited to be with me because of what I've done as an artist, not because of anything else. There's that whole celebrity rock star thing, and artists are into artists who have been able to achieve success their way.
When you're reinterpreting the same material eight shows a week, it's impossible to lock in the 'ideal' performance. Things that felt great in previews can feel forced three months in; jokes that got big laughs in the rehearsal room may suddenly fall flat in front of a paying audience.
Well, any time I'm preparing for a performance or even a rehearsal, it's as if in a way, like any other athletes, these are muscles that support the vocal cords which are just I believe cartilage. It demands a kind of constant warming up and a constant feeling of where is the voice today.
When we're ready to do the dress rehearsal, we'll rehearse in the dark. No lights. The reason why I do that is because I don't want the band to rely on me for anything. 'Cause anything can happen - I might stop singing or unplug the mic, just so everybody knows: Keep going, no matter what.
I'm someone who started in the theater and really couldn't stand repeating the show. My favorite part of acting is the five or six weeks of rehearsal that you get. I like doing previews; I like the opening week because my friends and family come, and then after that, I don't want to do it anymore.
I've done a lot of fight scenes, and I always find that it's better that they be meticulously choreographed. You want them to look as real as possible, but you don't want anyone to get hurt. So I believe in really working it out in rehearsal, and when you get to the set, just go for it 100 percent.
It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it.
But you really - I always think that a director has got to adapt to whatever the needs of the actor are. You know, so if you take someone like Eddie Murphy, who is not a big fan of rehearsal. You know he comes out of stand-up. He comes - it's all about capturing the moment - in the moment, you know.
Certain movies like 'Wag The Dog,' we used improv on every scene that we did. Pretty much, we would shoot from the script and then some stuff that we came up with in rehearsal, and then we'd have at least one or two takes where we completely went off the script and just flew by the seat of our pants.
Theatre is all about the process and the sense of community that is created. You have weeks of rehearsal, time to explore your character and get to know the other actors. There is opportunity to try off-the-wall ideas, to find layers and nuance over weeks. You become like a second family with your cast.
When you're in a rehearsal room, it's like getting into a car and going on a long journey with everyone's stuff in the back. If you keep stopping the car and going, 'Are you sure we want to go?' and think, 'This is really daunting,' you will get frightened, so you just have to keep ploughing through it.
My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.
When you audition for things, there's pressure to go in there with a complete performance, and it's kind of unfair because, if you get it, you'll have rehearsal and talk about it, and you'll have plenty of time with the script. So, for me, I really do feel like an audition is a sketch of what you might do.
A movie is a filmed rehearsal in a way. The audience doesn't know that because you're taking out the things that don't work. There's no comparison to the theater because it's live. But making a movie is just as challenging and exciting, I find. A movie is pure process. The theater is the result of process.
'Grease' was my Broadway debut. That was eye-opening. At the same time, it was very familiar. It was a Broadway show, but it's kind of the same as doing a show in Minnesota. It's the same type of rehearsal process. You are doing 8 shows a week, but I worked at a theatre in Minnesota that did 11 shows a week.
I'd think the house was the source of great sadness or pressure. I knew it wasn't. I knew it was just where I lived. But I'd walk up the stairs and the second floor was just desolate. My old bedroom: empty. My old rehearsal room: empty. First floor studio: messy and empty. Middle room: broken gear everywhere.
'One Tree Hill' was my first television experience, so naturally I was nervous initially. There is no rehearsal, you get your script a few days ahead, and you work. I was also the youngest actor, 13, on set at that time, but it was amazing to be able to 'learn the ropes' with such a supportive group of people.
My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, unfortunately in film, you get very little opportunity to have.
I would go into a place that was quiet and isolated and think about how my character would feel in the situation, considering who he was and what he had been through. I would think about that even up to 30 minutes. And when I felt the character was in my body and I had left, I could walk onto set or into rehearsal.
I auditioned for a one-act version of 'The Princess and the Pea' called 'The Ugly Duckling,' and I was cast as the King, starting a pattern of being cast in roles originally intended for men. I went to the first rehearsal, and I didn't get any laughs, and I choked and I quit. I walked away from it and joined the tennis team.
People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.
No question that 'Birdman' is a breathtaking technical achievement, not a stunt. Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors' and the camera's movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.
My exercise regime for the film was really intense. I'd work out with a trainer six days a week, and then I had a stunt rehearsal team that would do boxing, stretching, and a little bit of parkour. And yet, people don't get to see me shirtless in this movie. I don't know if you've seen the trailer, but this Aladdin wears a shirt.
You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again.
I love Michelle Williams. I think she's extraordinary. I was such a fan of 'Blue Valentine,' and I heard stories about how Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams worked on that. They lived together for a period of time as rehearsal. From nine in the morning to five at night, living in a space together. The work is really awe-inspiring.
Somebody told me about a band that works out their whole set as if it was one song. They learn the whole set as one piece, so they know how the dynamics of it work. It's really difficult to do, and you can only really do it while you're on tour, as being in a rehearsal studio is not the same as being on stage in front of an audience.
It just gives us that adrenaline charge when we go on. We know we're gonna come off two hours later, but we're pushing it all the way; we build it right through. It's amazing how it happens. It's sort of magical, because you couldn't do it in a rehearsal like that; you need that audience in front, and that's really what gets us going.
It is quite amazing how hard the subconscious works when it is made to understand that this life is not a rehearsal, there is no safety net and no assurance of any final closure. It is also quite appalling to realize how catatonic the imagination can become when we hedge our bets, opt for the safer direction at every fork in the path.
In 'Fighting With My Family,' there's a scene where I have to wrestle; I have to do the famous fight between Paige and AJ Lee. We actually did perform it in front of all those thousands of people. And just beforehand, we had a little dress rehearsal, and there were all these famous wrestlers going around and watching as well. Terrifying.
If you arrive at a concert ready to play your piece, that's not nearly good enough. You must have your music ready to the point where you can play it on a short rehearsal, after a long plane flight, on a strange piano, having had an unpleasant lunch, in an unfriendly atmosphere. You have to be so over-prepared that you can cope with anything.
It was in Cardiff, and the cast was 60 per cent Welsh-speaking. It's the first time I've walked into a rehearsal room speaking my mother tongue, which in itself was a breath of fresh clean air from the Welsh mountains. Singing Hans Sachs is always a milestone, but I was happy to be part of such an achievement, not personally but as a company.
One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.
Everything in The Room, we did it the same way the big studios do it. The only difference is the budget and the actors. We put an ad in Back Stage West and in return we got almost 8,000 headshots from people who wanted to be in the film. We then do a process of selection and a rehearsal process after they are selected. The process of audition is very time consuming.
You have formal rehearsal, a lot of things you don't have in movies - which is, you have to formally rehearse. You have to know your back story, discuss it, and almost everybody onstage has to know each other's [story], so that when it comes time to actually do it, you can throw it all away. That's the way I like to - and I didn't realize until very recently - that's the way I like to prepare for movies.
I've been quoting the book [on Peter Sutcliffe] constantly in rehearsals. Some members of the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written. Some of the women have expressed more - disgust and anger. What are they saying? They'd prefer not to know, not to understand? They'd prefer certain areas of life to be censored? Isn't that partly what breeds the Sutcliffes and the Nilsens?
Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.
You cannot begin to imagine the shock I had when I came down on the floor for the first time. First of all, there's this whole thing about playing sitcom comedy. I didn't want to do the sitcom thing, but I didn't know what else to do. I went slowly. We went through the week of rehearsal, then we got on the floor with the cameras, which I'm used to because of my experience in the old days. Then came camera day, with an audience, and it was stunning, enthralling, exciting and chaotic. I had never experienced anything like that before, as an actor. I was part minstrel, part actor.