Film and television essentially feel the same when you’re doing it, because it’s the same technical approach. All the homework is the same. The homework for each medium is all similar, but the gratification in a live theater context is much higher, because it’s immediate. It’s far more dangerous, because there are no retakes. It’s electric, it’s an actual chemical transaction that occurs between you and the audience. Whatever energy you’re throwing out to them they throw it right back to you, and it kind of feeds on itself in this vacuum…

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.

To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now.

On stage the interaction with the audience happens while performing. In fact, the actor needs and depends on the audience response. It not only energizes and enhances the actor’s performance but is a source of much satisfaction. When acting in film, you are acting for the camera so you are not dealing directly with the audience…

There’s a charge and immediacy to theatre that I don’t find in any other medium. It’s an artform in the present tense, a medium tailor-made to explore the world you live in NOW…

That’s the wonderful thing about the theater. Unlike in the movies where once a movie is finished and released you can’t change it, in the theater a show is a living thing. When you realize something is wrong you can actually fix it and mount a new production.

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.

These type of stories still go on. This is something that has to be said. It’s been done in many ways, but I think that theater being done live has a different impact. And when we come out of the show we stop and think–”What can I do in my society to make it better?”

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.

A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that is generated in the crowd and on stage. It's my favorite part of the business — live concerts.

Theatre is more than just dialog; it’s a complete sensory experience for an audience. They see, they hear, they connect with the actors on stage…

[I]n the theatre, life is happening now. That's Falstaff's first word: "Now!" It's not reported life, it's life right there.

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.

Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques — realism, depth of character, complicated storytelling…What we have that’s different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And I’m not interested in ignoring the space between us.