What goes on between an actor and the audience, at its best, is a dialogue. Sometimes you watch an actor on stage and somehow the performance isn’t getting through. The fourth wall is not only closed, it’s soundproofed. That’s because the actor isn’t connecting with the living and breathing human beings in the room with him. The audience feels the distance and they react accordingly. As an actor, you have to fire up your sensors at 100 percent all the time. You have to be in touch with all those heartbeats in the audience, connect with them. Sometimes during the Grinch performances, a child will shout out something. And I’ll turn right around, look them in the eye and respond to them.

I think the main thing I do every show, and I guess most performers do this, is engaging the audience, but I like to engage the audience in a very direct way right off the bat by starting the show with giving them the choice to participate or not because that’s the choice. By choosing to participate or not, you’re participating. Do you know what I mean? And I can figure out what their level of participation’s going to be and where I can go into crowd.

Interaction with fans has always been one of my most coveted prizes as an actor. The chance to stand or sit or have dinner or share a drink, with people who appreciate your work as a performer and who feel genuinely compelled to share a story with you. Whether they loved the effects or about how your character, or that situation, or the overall arc of that one story helped them in some way; resolve something in their lives, address some unanswered question, or even just entertained them. It's always really humbling to connect with fans. I'm very glad to be in a position to touch people’s lives in a creative way. To share and love and teach through story.

Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience. You step out on the stage and you can feel it is a nervous audience. So you calm them down. I come out before an audience and maybe my house burned down an hour ago, maybe my husband stayed out all night, but I stand there. I'm still. I don't move. I wait for the introduction. Maybe I cough. Maybe I touch myself. But before I do anything, I got them with me, right there in my hand and comfortable. That's my job, to make them comfortable, because if they wanted to be nervous they could have stayed home and added up their bills.

It’s so immediate. It’s very exciting. The audience is there so there’s no retake. There’s no stopping and no chance to redo. You feel the audience and their response to what you’re doing. You get the energy from the audience that you don’t get in a film. Live theater is fluid. You start at the top and go all the way through. You have a seamless feeling and it’s different each night, whether it’s a long or short run. Different things happen each night. There’s a different nuance with the people you act with in each performance. It may be very subtle and very slight and the audience may not catch it, but you do.

You can control the audience. You can make the audience so happy one minute, and so sad the next minute. In film, it’s up to the directors to cut it well. Sometimes an actor may not give a very good performance, but the editor does a good job.

Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

Stage acting is where the beauty of being an actor lies, while movies more or less follow trends. The quality of an actor is revealed on the stage.

Theatre is a terrific environment to hone your storytelling skills as well as fine tune your performance, both of which I'm very grateful for and that I use in my prep process for this medium [of television], also, when you have a live audience, they are the last member of the cast, if you will. You can rehearse a show as much as you want,a how that night will turn out until your final company member is in the house, and that's the audience.

You are so right. You really can’t act as if you can dance or sing on stage. It’s actually something you have to do live. You end up learning new skills. That reminds me. For me, the good minister from Kunyarara pushed my physical stamina for a role. I remember TCee, who was in charge of choreography – it was 6 weeks of torture. But the applause made it worthwhile. One thing we tend to forget as performers is what a varied audience we always have. From the dancers themselves to fellow actors, doctors, students, lovers and what not. There’s a level of honesty that you have to find within yourself to truly ‘sell’ your character’s performance in every show.

The best part about acting is reacting. Audiences don't know that they mustn't sit back and observe and say, "I will watch this." Whether it's my play or anybody's play, they must become participants. Too many people today are observing life instead of participating in it.

I feel the audience is very much there, It’s a big thing — to let an audience in, let them affect and move you.

I'm very nervous when I work in a film and very relaxed before a live audience. I like theater because it's more of an actor's medium. You can control your performance. In film you depend on the director to watch out for your ass, but in the theater you can take care of yourself.

Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.