Many Hollywood stars, even those at the top of their profession, shy away from Broadway. Bruce Willis and Al Pacino, for example, both tried to debut their screen acting skills on the stage in 2015, but ended up being panned by critics.
Consensus was that the leading men struggled to memorize a full script all at once—so they came across as distracted or tonally confused. Pacino even had to read his lines from a series of strategically placed teleprompters that forced him to stand awkwardly in the same places on stage.
Going off-book, theater slang for rehearsing without reading a script, allows actors to practice rudiments of their craft like body positions and eye contact, to choreograph, and to build emotional chemistry with other actors. Even more importantly, it offers the freedom of improvisation that can turn a good script into a great play.
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