Onstage Quotes by Jamie Campbell Bower, Jessie Mueller, B. B. King, Phylicia Rashad, Kerry King, Bob Newhart and many others.
Being able to do lead roles in pictures or onstage or whatever it is that you‘re doing in acting is obviously what you strive for because you want to better yourself as an actor and you want to better yourself as a person as well. But that does come with a lot of responsibility and a great deal of weight.
I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.
In a sense, the rumours suggesting I had quit were true: I had retired, but only from the personal-appearance end. I did that because I had always felt conspicuous onstage, and I’m not the sort of person who likes to be an exhibitionist.
My mom was onstage when she was pregnant with me.
Onstage, I was never the ingenue.
I could never go onstage in denims.
I like to do the splits onstage.
When I come onstage, I’m exploding.
I’ve done stand-up since I was 18 years old, and I absolutely love it, but I used to go onstage, and the audience was my peers. Now I go onstage, and I could be their mother.
Performing is my passion. Being onstage is at once exhilarating, beguiling, and fulfilling. But it’s hard.
I’m not a really religious person, but those moments onstage feel like some sort of religious experience because no one holds back, especially ‘Stay With Me‘ when I finish the show. It kind of turns into an anthem when I perform it live, and it feels like there’s a lot of love in the room.
But I love the hot sweat. I think overheating onstage is invigorating. It’s better than being comfortable. I think being comfortable is the death of a show.
When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.
I have a responsibility to diversity onstage, but one of the things I’ve heard about our production of ‘Boys’ is that it’s a bunch of white guys. Well, race is a component of this play. You can’t just drop people in willy-nilly and say, ‘Well, we’re going for diversity.’
I’ve always been really open onstage.
I continue to be very shy. I think a lot of actors and performers are really weird, shy people working it out onstage. I don’t know why that is.
I feel most free onstage. The audience, it’s an abstraction. You don’t really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you.
I think sometimes comedians and entertainers and artists, sometimes they get onstage, and it’s all for what they want to do. I think you still need to do stuff for the audience. They’re the ones who are making it possible.
I’m not good at interacting with people and am terrified to get onstage, so I just go up there, freak out and, most of the time, pack up and go home immediately after.
I’ve never acted, but I’m an entertainer. So I kind of used what I know from being onstage. I’ve done a thousand and two interviews, and I’ve been on camera a million times, so I’m not uncomfortable on camera, but it was interesting for me to be someone else.
For a long time, because I’m pretty tall, I was scared to wear heels, but now I wear them all the time. I feel like I’m still discovering my stage style, but I love – well, I’m not a huge color person onstage, but I am in real life. I like short stuff, big heels, fringe, lots of fringe, sometimes sparkle, yeah!
I’ve been making fun of administrations since I was a teenager onstage.
I missed New York. Every break I had from the series, I’d fly back to the East Coast just to get back onstage.
I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas ‘Mike & Molly‘ deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It’s not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he’s a lot bluer onstage.
There is a big difference between what I do onstage and what I do in my private life. I don’t put my living room on magazine pages.
You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don’t, if you walk out onstage complacent, that’s not a good thing.
I’ve heard New York actors say Chicago actors intimidate them because apparently we’re the real nitty-gritty actors who’re in a town where being onstage doesn’t necessarily get you anything except your craft.
I want to feel lucky every night when I go onstage, and not feel like, ‘Oh, great, here we go again.
Onstage, there’s a separation between character and audience; onscreen, you can go to a deeper place.
I’m too nervous to eat before I go onstage, and I’ll usually eat out after the performance or when I get home at midnight.
I’ve been performing since I was a child; my mother would have to pull me aside and tell me that I wasn’t onstage. I was a cheerleader, president of choir, and in the school play.
Everything that I hate about myself goes away when I was onstage.
I love being onstage, whether it’s dancing or acting – there’s just something about being onstage.
I’m always curious about anyone who has enough passion to go onstage and say, ‘This is what I’m really passionate about.’ It’s always worth listening to.
I love that my fans are cool with me being lovey-dovey about my wife rather than pretending that I’m single and trying to act all sexy onstage.
Going onstage is like going into battle. You’re ultimately there to win. It’s driven and fuelled by passion and a desire to do it.
Any time I see anything moving onstage, I’m cautious about it.
I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?
People don’t know what it’s like standing up there onstage, when you have a wall of people smiling at you.
I might come across like kind of a show-off onstage and stuff, but I like collaborating with people.
I don’t sit and write stand-up material; I come up with an idea onstage.
Don’t kid yourself; the guy who’s onstage in ripped-up jeans is wearing as much a costume as I am.
I’ve had jokes stolen a thousand times. But if you can do it better than me, you can have it. I’ve had jokes stolen from me in the club when I’m next on stage. And my brain will start to turn, and the gears will start turning, and I’ll go onstage and create a whole new bit.
I always felt like there wasn’t a blueprint for father-daughter relationships – for them or for us. Because what are they supposed to do with us, treat us like boys, or small women, or what? Father-daughter relationships are so unique from family to family, and I’d love to watch it explored more onstage.
My thing is to get up there and have a good time and give the fans all you can and appreciate them spending their money and being in the stands – and just be appreciative of them cheering when you come onstage.
The more guitars we have onstage the better, as I’m concerned.
As a dancer, one of my many teachers along the way made the comment that who I was onstage and who I was off were two totally different people.
The most important thing you can do as a performer is to be yourself, or be an onstage version of yourself. If you’re not being true to yourself, and somebody likes that other version of you, you’re kind of stuck.
It’s kind of weird – I get shy when I’m around new people, still, even when I’m onstage. I come from not really wanting to be in lights or known or in front of people.
Now when I step onstage, I have this hour when I can just be completely myself, just a massive ball of energy. Sometimes I get so lost in the performance, people look a little frightened – but that’s a good thing.
Some people love being onstage and really open up, and I’m sort of the opposite of that. I don’t crave the spotlight. I’m still not comfortable even talking onstage.
When Kehlani brought me out onstage, I really enjoyed that. I was just appreciative for her to think of me and bring me out woman to woman, introducing me to a whole new audience to me. It was just showing that I was appreciated for what I’m doing, that some people mess with me, and I’m all over the place.
I dearly remember the old days… Fleetwood Mac had this one-of-a-kind charm. They were gregarious, charming and cheeky onstage. Very cheeky. They’d have a good time.
I think a lot of people think I’m doing kind of a character onstage, but what you’re really getting is just me.
Half the time, when I first run onstage, I can’t look directly at the audience just because of self-consciousness. It’s human nature. Sometimes you feel like the man, and sometimes you don’t. But sometimes that self-conscious energy is good for the show, it draws people in more.
Frontmen come alive when they come onstage.
I was always shy and had a huge fear of being onstage.
I really don’t think of myself as a singer. I think of myself as an entertainer, and the best place I do it is onstage.
Just me onstage with a mike having an intimate relationship with the audience. I don’t get nervous for that. I just get excited.
People buy a ticket to see your show, so from the moment I get onstage, I can have no insecurities, because they’re already there. You have to get people to listen. If they listen, everything’s cool.
I hate touring. But being onstage is one of the absolute best things I know in my life. And it is so good, it makes up for all the bad.
People just get to see me onstage, and they don’t get whole of me.
I love to create something new every night onstage; that makes a big difference.
I just enjoy being onstage and relating to the audience.
I would go to sleep and dream about being onstage with thousands and thousands of people.
That’s part of what made me interested in theater as a kid. It made it acceptable to be a man for an hour onstage.
All I want to do is be onstage. A performer needs to perform.
To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.
I’ve been lucky enough to do a tiny bit of Shakespeare onstage over the years.
I’m amazed how unable I am to deal with the demands that are made on me as an actor. Not the one I enjoy, which is standing in front of a camera or onstage pretending to be someone else but everything else that comes with it.
I’ve been onstage once for one performance with four days’ rehearsal.
We always joke that our road crew will have to wheelchair us up onstage soon because this is what we do. This is what we love to do. This is what God put us on earth to do until the day we take our last breath.
It’s not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it’s communicated through pictures. So it’s always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.
I don’t know if I have a favorite part of being an artist. I do love being onstage and performing with my band. I also love rehearsing with them and creating the show, that’s always a fun part. But there’s also nothing like being in the studio and being able to get back to myself and get back to my feelings.
Onstage or in films, you do affect peoples’ lives, and sometimes that’s very gratifying. But still, there’s this little voice that says you should be doing something that matters.
I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that’s how I get it out – with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it’s always kind of a wail.
I’m really vulnerable onstage because it’s just me. I’m not really trying to put up a front or act a certain way.
I’ve played a couple of gay characters onstage, and it’s always been something I’m comfortable with. I grew up in a family and a culture that doesn’t have stigmas about sexuality.
I feel like any single woman of color who’s been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from ‘For Colored Girls.’ It’s just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.
I really thrive being onstage.
Every time I go onstage, it’s a little less ‘Chris Rock’s brother.’
I feel like I wear kind of the same things on stage that I would wear every day, unless I’m being lazy, and then I just wear trackies. But actually, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t really walk down Kilburn High Street in a leotard, and I would wear that onstage.
The misconception about the record company is that they were the ones who got me wearing short skirts, or got me to do my hair blond, or got me to dance around onstage and start doing different things with my clothes. No, that was actually all me.
I sort of write onstage. I’ll throw an idea out there, like Home Depot, and just start talking about it.
Regardless of injuries, we would get onstage, and as soon as we were up there it was like, bam! You were hit with an incredible force. The band came alive on stage like someone had switched us on.
I had no desire to get up onstage and tell jokes. I prefer to stand next to really funny people.
When I first started acting in college, at Cal, the thing that I loved about acting was not being onstage but going into rehearsals. The thing, as I look back on it now, that I was most attracted to, was that I felt like I’d found my family. It was just a bunch of loonies.
It’s nice to be able to show how we are like in person and give a peek behind the curtain with ‘Total Divas.’ That’s been my biggest feedback is how different than I am behind the scenes than I am onstage.
I did not want to go onstage and play Led Zeppelin songs; there has to be more than that. I wanted to create a complete experience of what Led Zeppelin means to me, growing up around them and being part of it all my life.
I saw a concert with Nena singing ’99 Red Balloons‘ on TV and I said, ‘I will also go onstage and sing.’
I played Sky Masterson in ‘Guys and Dolls‘ at St. Ignatius. I walked out onstage at one point looking for Nathan Detroit, and I’m supposed to say, ‘Has anyone seen Nathan Detroit?’ But, instead, I said, ‘Has anyone seen Sky Masterson?’ I immediately realized what I’d done, so I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m Sky Masterson!’
For years, I was stuck behind a keyboard rig. When I started playing guitar onstage, it was a bit of a release – not to be stuck in one spot the whole night. It’s really enjoyable having the freedom to move around. You just have to remember to end up somewhere near a microphone.
I wasn’t playing the music, the music was playing me… and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn’t wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud… You cannot fool an audience.
I’ve gotten to where my hair is like my onstage prop; I need to hide behind it and throw it around – it’s my slo-mo effect.
There’s something about being onstage, singing my lyrics to somebody and them either listening and receiving them, or singing them back to me, that I just can’t get enough of.
It’s definitely a high when you walk onstage and everybody starts applauding before you even say anything.
I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more.
Jazz onstage is a very intimate exchange between everybody that’s onstage.
What I’m pretty much giving you when you see me onstage is me; it’s not a fake character.
There are definitely some set topics I go onstage with and want to talk about, but there’s also an element of improvisation and spontaneity that I like to bring to each performance and talk about uniquely in that room.
I got to a point where I wanted to have some dignity in what I’m saying onstage. I want people to hear what I’m saying, regardless of whether or not it gets a laugh. That became a lot more rewarding than straight acting could ever be for me.
If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there.
I’ve figured out what to do with my hands… onstage. I’m a percussion player, so I grab a tambourine as much as I can.
It’s really empowering when you see yourself represented in entertainment and, especially, onstage when you’re talking about how this country came to be.
Look at Greg Jbara! I’ve watched him work for years, always switching. He’s literally a different human being when he’s onstage in ‘Billy Elliot.’ That’s the fun of what we do.
I’m not saying I’ll never go solo – never is a long time – but I’ve always been onstage with someone else. That way, you’re in it together, and you can feel, together, when the songs are right.
I was just making music in my bedroom. I never wanted to be onstage.
Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.
Baseball players practice, runners practice, so how can you practice being funny? You get up onstage. You train as an improviser, playing make-believe, using the vernacular of improvisation, saying ‘yes and’ to other people’s ideas, making statements.
Whether I’m performing in a club or onstage as Erika Jayne, whether I’m making records, whether I’m doing TV, I’ve got to entertain, and I have to take people away from their space and bring them into mine.
Musicians want to be heard. So I’m not hiding. But I do like to leave it there onstage and be myself, in that sense. Because some people carry it with them.
I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I’m not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.
I get embarrassed a lot of times getting attention, but I like being onstage. Do you know what I mean? If I’m in a crowd of people and they’re all looking at me, I will feel embarrassed. It’s a strange dichotomy.
I’m not the first one to say it, but that time onstage is a heightened sense of present tense.
Onstage, I don’t want to be thinking about my outfit, I want to think about what I’m doing, so I’ll try to dress as comfortably as possible.
You never know what’s going to happen next onstage.
You can be an incredible player, but when you get onstage, you’ve gotta be yourself, and you’ve gotta bring it, as we say, and that just means give 120 percent.
If I had my way, I’d always be onstage. But I won’t always be able to be onstage.
I think film and television actually is a lot harder. Acting onstage is physically more arduous, but to get to emotional truth within a scene, it’s much tougher to do it on film.
In my day, in my era, Ralph McDaniels, just being five and being at his block party, you could just got onstage.
My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.
And watching Ed, he’s really coming into his own doing some new things onstage I’ve never seen him do. He’s really getting into it, putting 120 percent into the show. We feel comfortable and excited.
I still get really nervous, though, before each performance. It kind of hits about 15 minutes before we go onstage – sometimes I don’t even want to go on. But once I’m onstage I’m fine.
There is a healthy amount of self-doubt and criticism with most people that make music. You find your areas that are your best. Onstage, I am good. But talking to someone in the grocery store? Forget about it.
I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, ‘Yay! I’m so happy!’ It’s easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the ‘isms‘ instead, but we can’t all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well… it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.
Joe Rogan has this podcast where he’s talking astrophysics and lean BMI indexes and weird philosophy most of the time and yet, when you see him onstage, you’re like, ‘Oh, this guy is just a killer comedian.’
When I’m on the microphone and I’m recording, or onstage, or shooting a video, I’m doing my job. When I’m not, I’m being myself.
I was five years old, onstage singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ – a rock version – and I was always wanting to entertain. But the biggest thing for me is just country music has helped me get through the worst times of my life and the best times of my life. I want to give that back to people.
I started using sunglasses in Alabama. I was going to do a show with Patsy Cline and Bobby Vee, and I left my clear glasses on the plane. I only had the sunshades, and I was quite embarrassed to go onstage with them, but I did it.
A couple of my favorite actors are Don Cheadle, Jeffrey Wright, and, may he rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’ve had an opportunity to see all of them onscreen and onstage.
I just like to play and I’m always ready to be back onstage.
Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can’t just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.
Onstage, we’re very dominant and aggressive. But we laugh and play a lot, too.
I get nervous all the time. The only time I’m not nervous is onstage, which is weird.
There is nothing – nothing – like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.
It’s hard ‘coz you have got different time zones; you can’t sleep and y’know, it’s boring way for the show to happen, but you do off the stage. Y’know, onstage it’s all better.
When I’m onstage, I’m on, but a different part of me is on: the part of me that absorbs life, sees everything occurring, and touches on everything around me.
Sometimes in my mind I still think I’m 16 onstage and my body tells me that I’m not 16 anymore.
You study all your life, you work really hard to do your best work onstage and onscreen, and then you make your best money playing an ant.
When you’re onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it’s very artificial. You can’t really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.
When I finally decided that my only hope was to go to college, I took an acting class, and once I walked onstage, I just knew I was home.
You are an athlete when you’re onstage. You can’t get tired.
I always take a hot shower before I go onstage. It’s so refreshing. I let the steam into my throat. That’s the way I warm up my vocal cords – in the shower. I start by humming and then finally singing.
I’m always onstage, and everyone there already loves me, so I go with this certain confidence.
On a good night, I get underwear, bras, and hotel-room keys thrown onstage… You start to think that you’re Tom Jones.
I really enjoy creating music onstage, to participate in making music live.
I love being onstage, I love getting applause, and I love the love that comes across the footlights. It’s so much a part of what I do and what I’ve done most of my life.
Whenever I go to shows, I end up looking at what shoes the guy onstage is wearing and the jacket he’s got on. And when you know everything’s gonna be under scrutiny, it makes you feel more comfortable if you have cool stuff.
I have a big persona onstage sometimes, but offstage, I’m super shy. Like, I don’t want to perform for people – I’d rather die than sing in a room for someone.
I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don’t have to know more about them than they’ve given you already.
I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus – having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don’t see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it’s more exploring a different side of your personality.
I’m reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don’t think has anything to do with fiction.
I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?
If you were 12, and Beyonce was up onstage saying to you, ‘You get to do exactly whatever you want to do,’ that would be awesome. I wish she said it to me when I was 12.
I don’t need the money after 11 years on ‘Frasier,’ and there aren’t that many great roles onstage left for somebody my age. I’m more interested in playing those roles than I am in playing bit parts in movies.
I’ve talked to Bill Clinton – he’s the ultimate rock star; no one’s more charming than him. People clap in a restaurant when he finishes dinner! I don’t get that treatment. I get it when I walk onstage, but not when I have dinner.
Figure out a way to get back onstage because once you do it a few times you’ll get over it. Unless it’s like a clinical thing. I don’t know about clinical like stage fright, that might be worse than what I’m talking about. But if it’s normal stage fright get over it.
L.A. is always great. There’s something special about L.A. And New York, for me, because it’s home. There’s nothing quite like walking onstage at Madison Square Garden.
I celebrate masculinity when I’m onstage.
I don’t enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I’m a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: ‘What else is in the news?’ Writing is work, which I’m not comfortable with.
What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word ‘great’ out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.
When we’re onstage, it’s like mind reading: we’re on the same page.
I’m very lucky to work in so many different arenas of the entertainment industry and I do enjoy them all, but making music – original music – in the studio or live onstage is definitely my favorite thing to do.
When you get new people around you, the excitement is new because they have different take on your music. They play it in a different way, and that’s always exciting to be around. It elevates everybody onstage.
I like my jumpsuits. They’re easy to get about in, I can move a bit onstage, there’s nothing to tuck in, and I don’t look like a little girl.
We have such an energetic live show. We have so much fun onstage. We swap instruments. We might possibly be the sweatiest band in the business.
I think my perception of my own life is different and the fact that Lauren and myself are together. I’ve never felt this free or happy and so that permeates onto my onstage persona and to my working environment.
Tiesto is legend. I’ve been in the studio many times. We did a tour together; I jumped onstage with him, he jumped onstage with me. Still, every time, I have to pinch myself and realize this is the guy who made me start doing what I’m doing right now.
I’ve been known to wear pajamas onstage for the sole reason of wanting to make sure I’m free enough to execute new things vocally onstage and give my best performance possible.
My wife and I got to go onstage at a Flaming Lips concert at Webster Hall once. We dressed up like Scientology aliens and danced around. We had a shootout onstage with Santa Claus.
I don’t write anything. It’s all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don’t sit down and write.
I’m now learning how to distinguish when I’m acting and when I’m not acting – offstage as well as onstage.
I mean, you still can’t jump offstage and go read a book. But I’m getting better at it. It is something you can manage. You can still give everything you have to the audience onstage, and have something for yourself.
So much about getting onstage is creating a connection with an audience that allows you to go different places and try different things.
I only wore makeup when I went onstage.
We wanted to be successful, we wanted to shoot a video. We just wrote a song and we were like, ‘OK, let’s go onstage! Let’s shoot a video for it!’ That was always our dream… We just wanted to have fans and a crowd who would listen.
The crowd really controls how I am onstage. One show, it might be a lot of young people, super-high-energy dancing. I mirror that. Other shows, it’s much more calm.
I learned early on that you do yourself a disservice trying to replicate the record onstage every night. As a player, and for the audience I think, it’s a mistake.
I try to avoid gaining weight as much as possible because it hinders my performance onstage. Touring demands so much energy.
When you’re onstage in theater, if you mess up a line, there’s no ‘Cut! We’ll get it again.’ It’s full steam ahead.
Do I show up onstage late sometimes? That’s something I could definitely work on. I’m human.
Lesbian humor isn’t trying to sell anything, it doesn’t have to sell out. Coming out as a lesbian onstage is still a very political act; if it weren’t, more women would do it.
We pray before everything – videos, onstage, TV shows. I think that has a lot to do with being successful.
In real life we don’t know what’s going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next – if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.
We’ve just always felt like we had a product onstage that represented us.
I have a wonderful psychiatrist that I see maybe once a year, because I don’t need it. It all comes out onstage.
It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.
I was more used to acting onstage, for a long time. I don’t know, maybe I was temperamentally more suited to stage stuff. And there are things about the stage that I miss in a lot of ways.
When you start performing, you realize that you have to separate yourself from the pack. So I would never wear bell-bottoms, which everybody else was wearing. I had short hair – and to see a 21-year-old guy walk onstage without longish hair was, in itself, weird. Every entertainer needs a shtick.
One of the big conversations I’m trying to have onstage right now is that to be pro-woman, you don’t have to be anti-man. Saying all men suck makes you look like an idiot. And it’s not helpful.
Playing onstage, I’m always aware of where the bathrooms are. When Crohn’s hits, I have to run, or it won’t be pretty.
I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.
For me, music is so passionate, I have to give it my all every time I go onstage. Onstage, it was always comfortable for me, because that’s where I felt at home.
Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.
I’m sure when alternative comedy started, before which – Billy Connolly aside – standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it’s just progress.
When I get onstage, I automatically feel beautiful.
Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
I really do feel now that the way I dress onstage and for work is a true reflection of my own sense of style as well.
I get an idea about something. I just start thinking about it, and then I get onstage and I talk about it, and then I think about it some more and talk about it some more, and think about it some more and talk about it some more, until it starts to take a shape.
The more you work in this business as a comedian, the closer you get to just being yourself onstage, on camera, the more well received you are.
For some reason, people don’t want to see a girl onstage. Whether it’s a girl or a guy, if you like the music, who cares?
I’m just a Chicago actor who’s a playwright. Even with the success of ‘August,’ the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they’ve seen me onstage so much.
I also sort of find the idea that not only do actors want to please when they’re onstage, I find actors really want to please off stage a lot of the time, don’t they?
Americans need to call on Boomers, in their next act onstage, to behave like grown-ups. And there is no better way for them to do this than to guide young people to lives of greater meaning, effectiveness, and purpose.
That’s one of the great things about comedy: we can – and should – say the things that other people aren’t supposed to say. If we didn’t do that, if we didn’t push against those limits, we’d just be standing around onstage and yelling.
I don’t really move onstage; all I do is just gradually hunch more and more and jut out at the people in the front row.
I was a crazy Pee-wee Herman fan when I was in my early teens. Before he had the kids’ TV show, he had a nightclub show in L.A., and I had gotten a VHS copy of it. It was a kids’ show, but onstage in a bar, so it’s sort of poking fun at the kids’ show. And I was obsessed with that, and then ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.’
In the early days, we just wore black onstage. Very bold, my dear. Then we introduced white, for variety, and it simply grew and grew.
I like to pace onstage.
I remember walking onstage in the first performance, and something hit me like a brick wall, and I just knew at that moment that this is something I had to do for the rest of my life, and I’ve never looked back.
No matter what, I’m trying to have fun and, depending on the mood, fun can be on a roller coaster and playing onstage, or fun can be sitting in a room with three of your best friends talking for two hours.
Every time I’ve seen Sheryl Crow perform, it’s like effortless perfection. She’s so relaxed onstage, but she’s really locked into the music and having fun. Vocally, I’ve always looked up to her.
There were not a lot of women in the theater department – it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can’t really be backstage.
When I’m onstage they know I’m honest, and I try to be as humble as I can.
A concert is my experimentation time. I practice playing something several different ways, but in a concert, inevitably I get more ideas onstage, in that combination of focus and adrenaline, than I could ever get in the practice room.
I’m not drunk onstage, although I’ve done that a couple of times when I was younger. It’s partly just the way I talk – I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I’m your 150-year-old grandmother.
A woman is like an actress: she’s always onstage.
If I go onstage, I want to give people everything they want and more. I’ll wash their car for them on their way out.
I was convinced that I was going to be onstage for the rest of my life.
I do understand that onstage there are times when you think, ‘I could not be more alive than I am at this moment. I can’t do most things in life. This is what I’m for.’
Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She’s interested in herself; why wouldn’t we be?
I’m sort of anti-Aristotelian. I want to get an entire life onstage while conveying a sense of how time feels, how unstoppable it is, and how we don’t really know what’s going on because as we’re trying to weave, it’s weaving us.
We’ve played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
I’ve taken all the mirrors out of my house because when I’m playing onstage, I feel like I’m still in high school. I feel like that kid that wanted to play in his first band, and then I look in a mirror, and it’s like, ‘Uh-oh!’ It ain’t pretty.
In TV and movies, you get known for a certain thing, and that’s what’s expected. Onstage, people are more open to whatever character you create from one play to the next.
I get terrible butterflies. Before I go onstage, I’ll have to freak out for five minutes. I scream. It seems to help!
I’d like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.
Most people want to be on TV as much as possible. I went up the ranks so fast because I was doing impressions, and nobody was really doing it when I started. I never got a chance to explore what’s my comfort level onstage.
There are a bunch of talented bands out there… So yeah, I often think, ‘Why aren’t these people onstage and why do I have a microphone?’
I have never been a different person onstage than I am off.
I’ve never met an artist who was at a certain level of spirituality offstage and then lowered it onstage.
I took dance from a very early age, although my first recital, I remember refusing to go onstage. I think I was three. It’s funny because that stage was also my high school theater stage.
I’m not saying I look cool, but every single time I go onstage, it is a fail if I don’t feel like I’m going to pass out at least twice.
But even so, I still get nervous before I go onstage.
I get so nervous before I go onstage – beyond butterflies!
If I was going onstage, of course I would talk about it. How could I not?
I don’t pull punches at all, and I write my material for adults. But if kids like it, they can come watch it. I’ll never change anything about what I do for anyone. I kind of think that’s why kids like me. If you’re a teenager, and there’s someone onstage talking to you like an adult, that’s good.
I loved Roy Acuff with all my heart, and I never dreamed I’d be able to meet him or see him onstage, or especially become good friends with him. For all this to happen, it’s hard to explain what a dream this is when you love something as much as I love traditional country music.
I started singing in coffeehouses when I was still in high school, in Santa Barbara. I took a job washing dishes and busing tables in the coffeehouse, so I could be there, and would beg permission to sing harmony with the guy who was singing onstage. That was the first time I ever got on a stage in front of people.
It doesn’t matter how you’re dressed onstage or what you say in your songs: that doesn’t give anybody the right to invade your personal space.
The young man who’s had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life – he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he’s never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn’t walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn’t have a dream of doing well.
When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year‘s Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He’s responsible for my favorite New Year’s memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.
When I perform onstage, I’m actually kind of nearsighted, so I don’t have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.
If I found a cure for a huge disease, while I was hobbling up onstage to accept the Nobel Prize they’d be playing the theme song from ‘Three’s Company’.
A lot of comedians are really funny onstage, but they can’t do a podcast.
I started as a straight actor. I’d go onstage, and I’d think, ‘Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don’t care – I’ll do it again.’
I have really musical parents, and my dad was always encouraging, but the desire to get onstage and perform really did come from me. I’d never push my future children.
I meditate and pray before going onstage – it helps me focus.
I like to pick out a certain part of each show I’m in and I watch it when I’m not onstage or in my dressing room. I’ll go down to the stage and watch that part of the show each night.
We put so much of ourselves onstage and we work so hard, that I never get tired of people telling me ‘you’re awesome.’
When I’m onstage, I have to have primer. Actually, the more primer, the less makeup I have to put on.
Most of the time, it’s pretending I’m somebody else to get into a different head space. A lot of times, it’s just, ‘Who do I want to be onstage tonight? Is it going to be Marc Bolan, or is it going to be Grace Jones, or Roy Orbison?’
I always just felt more comfortable just kind of hiding behind a character than being myself onstage.
I find with television, you have to play personality, whereas onstage, everyone talks about ‘the character,’ and what you do. It’s a very different thing, because stage is much bigger, but on television, for things to come across to the public, I think you have to play a bit of your personality.
Every now and then, when I think about it, I think, ‘What would I even talk about onstage?’ It’s never been, ‘I wonder if I’m funny. I wonder if I can come up with jokes.’ It’s more, ‘What would it be like without the leather suit and the anger?’
When I was onstage doing the work, adrenaline killed the pain because I never hurt in front of an audience.
It’s always been about the live show for us. We’re having Halloween onstage every night.
All the truly great stand-ups say, ‘I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I’m doing my work.’ To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.
Pure entertainment is not an egotistical lady singing boring songs onstage for two hours and people in tuxes clapping whether they like it or not. It’s the real performers on the street who can hold people’s attention and keep them from walking away.
You don’t need to exorcise your personal demons onstage.
I feel powerful when I’m onstage talking to an audience. I like communicating; it feels like my calling in the world. Knowing what you’re meant to be doing with your life is pretty bloody powerful.
A lot of people get a high from being onstage. I found ways to enjoy it. But I get it from being in the studio.
The Comedy Store in LA, it’s a really loose room and it’s really dark and creepy and a great place to explore your own thoughts onstage.
I’m very self conscious in a bikini, and I would never get my tummy out onstage.
I like being out onstage in front of everybody, getting that energy and giving that energy. Hopefully I am making them forget about all their problems in the world. For however many hours they are at our show, hopefully they are going to have a great time, and it makes life a little more bearable for everybody involved.
People are used to us being onstage for a while.
I love experimenting with clothes for photo shoots, but when I’m onstage, I want to show people that there are other options. You can just be yourself and still make good music.
All the satisfaction I need… comes when I step out onstage and see the people. That’s awesome. I love that.
When you look into the eyes of your people out there that came to see you, that’s when it’s like, ‘Yep, this is what it’s all about.’ This is why we don’t sleep, and this is why we write songs and try to be the best. This moment right here onstage.
The stuff I do and say onstage I can do easily. As a performer, that comes easily. But being social offstage, it’s not easy for me.
I’ve always felt a spiritual connection with acting. And I felt whole when I was onstage.
Instead of acting in court, I decided to act onstage.
I’m too scared to perform onstage. I’m not very good with big crowds.
I was in the original cast of ‘Wicked‘, and that got a bad review in ‘The New York Times,’ and it’s the most successful thing that’s ever been put onstage.
I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that’s what I did.
