All David Hyde Pierce has to do is go on stage, and receive applause, even before the idiot language of “The Pirates of Penzance” is launched:
I am the very model of a great modern general,
I have plant, animal and mineral information,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the historical fights
From marathon to Waterloo, in categorical order
With practice without expression on his face, babbling, all kinds of shock around him, it is fun.
I asked him: “Why do you think” less is more “can be fun?”
“Well, I think that much of the theater, rightly, is more,” Pierce replied. “Sometimes, what is unexpected in the theater is that someone does less.”
“Is there a temptation to exaggerate?”
“Always,” he said. “You remind me of a great line of ‘Fraier’, which was: ‘If less is more, think how much more will it be!” “
It is thanks to his 11 -year career in the mega success of television “Frasier” that Pierce has recognition and can afford to choose his roles. He is the biggest general in “Pirates! The Penzance musical”, a Jazz reworking of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic, transplanted to New Orleans.
Pierce showed us one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s scores of his summer camp of the 1970s (“It is almost as old as me”), which was also the score he used for an episode or “Frasier” where he, Kelsey Grammer and David Ogden. “.”
I asked him: “What does Gilbert mean and Sullivan for you?”
“Hmm. Well, it must mean something” because it’s … get excited, “Pierce replied.” Thinking about the question, I guess it’s alone, it’s just because it’s threaded for a long time for so long. “
In his dressing room at the La Rotonda Theater, the wall is covered with photographs of people who were in the locker room before: “Famous people, many dear friends of mine,” he said. “I will be up there anyway. Tradition is very important for us. It is aware that you are part of something bigger.”
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Pierce’s “pirates” costume is full of noddings to the emotional touch stones that define him, including one of the most important: a photograph of him talking to his father about a program he was doing, “at a time when he did not even know that it was what was entering, he had no idea what was ahead,” he said.
Pierce’s father and grandfather were amateur artists. “The disease extends in the family,” he said. “I guess I just diagnosed bone!”
The propagation of being a concert pianist. He still plays every day, but decided to become an Insead actor while he was a student at Yale.
And what led him to comedy? “I think he has to do what attracted me,” Pierce said. “VI repetitions of” The Dick Van Dyke Show “and” Mary Tyler Moore “and” All in the family. “When I was a teenager,” the Mushy Python flying circus to American television in PBS, and my head flew.
It is impossible not to see a touch of Buster Keaton in the famous Ironon task scene of Pierce de “Frasier”:
Pierce said: “I do people to laugh.”
“Why? What does that mean for you? Why is it important?”
“I suppose it is the perception of the connection,” he said. “For example, making a comic movie is not so pleasant for me how to do a comic play. In a comic play, you feel the connection of the audience. For that I am in it. That’s what I started. I love it.”
For almost while on her leg, her partner on the road, her husband since 2008, has been the writer Brian Hargrove. They with an audition, became friends, and only later discovered that both were homosexuals. “Brian took me to dinner in his department to make my taxes,” Pierce said.
“I used to have a fiscal business and an actor,” said Hargrove.
“That is not a metaphor; that is real what I was doing.
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That was in 1983. It was Hargrove who suggested moving to California, which led Pierce to be chosen as Dr. Niles Crane with Kelsey Grammer in “Fraser.” Forty years, four Emmy and two tonys later, should not be in the “Fraser” restart. At that time he played Julia Child’s husband, Paul, in HBO. “I am very happy with what originally came to me, and then, when I can make decisions in my career and the elections I have taken,” Pierce said. “My creativity is driven by change and diversity.”
That is why David Hyde Pierce said yes to the “pirates”, and a new opportunity to make people laugh in one of their old favorites.
For my military knowledge, although I am brave and adventure,
It has only been shot down at the beginning of the century;
But still, in plant, animals and mineral matters,
I am the very model of a major general general!
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History produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Ed Givish.