Repertory Quotations

In 1969, I wrote a musical called 'Mother Earth.' It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater.

This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

When I was about 6, my cousin was very active in a Filipino repertory company, doing musicals and plays. Her aunt was one of the founders of the company, and she told my mom that there were these auditions for 'The King and I,' and that they needed kids. I auditioned, got in and the love affair started from there and just kept going.

During the war, my mother used to take me to the local repertory theatre on a Monday night, and we used to get two seats for the price of one, for nine pence, in the gods.

I've always been short and stocky. So when I got into repertory theatre after graduation, I found myself doing character roles: because of my deep voice, shape and height, I was playing 40-year-old, 50-year-old roles at the age of 23.

My first role was in the George Gershwin musical 'Crazy for You' at the Orlando Repertory Theatre when I was 11 - I grew up in Florida - and I wasn't old enough to be in it, but they let me anyway. I was just this little shrimp in a leotard.

The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right.

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.

The one thing you can ask, I think, is that actors get paid a living wage. I would like it if all the repertory theatres that currently exist could do that. It would make a huge difference.

My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.

When I left Cambridge, I applied to regional repertory theaters in the U.K. and got accepted by one of them... And here I am, still at it.

The people who come downtown to go to the repertory theater or the Aurora or Anna's Jazz Club are not doing more than eating in restaurants. Ross is a discount clothing chain, and it's the most visible store in the downtown area right now. We'd like to have more to offer.

Between New York and L.A., and all of us who are actors, I feel like we're just one big, cast repertory company, all running back and forth between the coasts and between different shows. There is a wealth of great character actors, who show up, here and there, on different shows. I love the fact that we're allowed to do that.

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.

We went over Lead Belly's repertory with him. And we helped him round it off into concert form so that when he got up in front of his audience, he sang ballads and work songs and lullabies and children's games and square-dance tunes, the whole thing.

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?

South Africa had very poor repertory distribution. I didn't find out about Akira Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog until I got to the U.K.

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at.

Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water.

I've grown up doing repertory theatre where I've gotten to do all kinds of roles, and then there I was cast on St. Elsewhere for six years.

I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout.

The group that does costumes for the Tennessee Repertory Theater is doing our costumes. We have access to their stuff and we have the ability to have stuff made. It's wonderful to have our own costumer instead of having to go to thrift stores all the time. That's actually where most of our budget went.

The hardest thing was doing a show eight times a week after growing up in a repertory company,