Post by ironic maiden on Apr 22, 2008 19:57:25 GMT -5
I hope it's okay if I post an article here. It's not new, but I didn't see it posted yet.
And Now for Something Completely Different . . .[/b]
By JESSE GREEN
Published: March 6, 2005, NY Times
BEFORE playing the cosmically over-refined psychiatrist Niles Crane for 11 seasons on "Frasier," David Hyde Pierce worked for 11 years as a stage actor in New York and at regional theaters around the country. Before that, when he was just David Pierce (the Screen Actors Guild, already having a member by that name, Hyded him in 1993), he was a theater and English major at Yale - which is where I met him, in 1977. Steady and buttoned-down, with a keen but very dry sense of humor, he was not like the rest of us flamboyant theater types; and yet today, in his first Broadway appearance since his sitcom success, he is starring in perhaps the silliest musical ever: "Monty Python's Spamalot," which is in previews at the Shubert Theater and opens on March 17. Directed by Mike Nichols and also starring Tim Curry and Hank Azaria, "Spamalot" features Mr. Pierce, 45, as not-so-brave Sir Robin (among other roles): singing and dancing, clutching chickens, blessing hand grenades and generally putting his Yale education to good use. On Feb. 14, he took time off from writing Valentine's Day cards for his castmates - yes, really - to talk about how low he's sunk.
JESSE GREEN: When I met you, I don't think anyone would have guessed that you had an interest in performing. You seemed very reserved. In fact, when I first heard that you were doing a small part in an undergrad production of "A Man for All Seasons" --
DAVID HYDE PIERCE: You thought, "Is that wise?"
Q. I was dumbfounded. Did you have to overcome any reticence to present yourself in a theatrical context?
A. Never. In fact, I remember in fourth grade, I would write plays where I got to be Julius Caesar and we'd always do the death scene. I liked to fall down the staircase in my parents' house. Anything dramatic.
Q. When I later saw you in comic material, I thought of Bob Hope or Jack Benny. Did they influence you?
A. My comic influences are more from television - people like Bob Newhart. I was always drawn to a style of comedy that didn't ask for laughs, but just went about its business and allowed people to respond, as opposed to saying, "Look how funny this is." It's a more intimate performance style, meaning that the focus is between you and the other actors, while allowing the audience in. My greatest pleasure onstage or on TV - and it's why I hate doing movies - is to do as little as possible and get the biggest laugh.
Q. The Monty Python style, while it draws on a lot of intellectual and academic references, doesn't seem intimate in the way you're talking about.
A. Actually, Monty Python came on when I was in high school, and was a huge influence on my style of comedy. I remember the first time I saw it: I had come home late from practicing the organ at the church. I had a key to the church because -
Q. Because you were so cool.
A. That's right. Actually, the night of my senior prom, I was playing the organ.
Q. Insert your own joke here.
A. You see, I was destined to be Niles. Anyway, I came home, flipped on the TV and there was this sketch called "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker," in which Michael Palin plays a stockbroker who, on his way to work, fails to notice an angry Zulu warrior, a naked lady and a busload of gas-masked doughboys. It was very funny and very absurd but not played absurdly. No matter how big the event gets in Monty Python - people exploding from eating too much - the actual performance tends to be quite real.
Q. And you were quickly successful taking that approach; for a young actor with serious ambitions, you worked pretty steadily after college. You didn't have too many of the usual out-of-work-actor jobs.
A. I was a tie salesman at Bloomingdale's, and I know for a fact that I sent people's Christmas presents to foreign lands that they weren't supposed to go to. I was just totally inept. But I was lucky. I got to New York in the fall of '81, and in the spring of '82, I got my only waiting job, which was in "Beyond Therapy" on Broadway. It got a terrible review in some big New York paper and closed in a couple of weeks. But I had such a great time, I thought: "Man, if this is what it's like when a show doesn't work, I'm in. As long as the pleasure outweighs the pain, I'll stick with it." And that's still my strategy.
Q. You played several seasons at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Laertes at the Public and went on tour with Peter Brook's "Cherry Orchard" before you moved to California and started working in sitcoms. Did you ever begin to feel, with "Frasier" lasting so long, that you were straying from something you meant to do?
A. Never. I was performing once a week in front of a live audience in writing that was better than virtually any movie script I was ever sent.
Q. But at some point you started thinking about your post-"Frasier" career. Did you go looking for this project in particular?
A. No, it wasn't deliberate. I think it was September of 2003, I was sitting in the green room at "Frasier," when I read a blurb in The New York Times - can I say that? Does that sound like pandering? -
Q. You'll fit right in.
A. - that said Mike Nichols was going to direct a Broadway musical of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And I went directly into my dressing room, picked up the phone, called my agent and said, "Call them and tell them I don't care what the role is, I just want to audition."
Q. You didn't say, "I don't care what starring role it is, I just want to audition"?
A. No, no, no. I didn't care. It was a confluence of several things. I'd been wanting to do a musical; Monty Python was integral to who I was as a performer and everything I learned growing up; and I'd worked with Mike several times and knew he was the best.
Q. Did it surprise you that Mike Nichols - you know, "Angels in America," "Silkwood" Mike Nichols - wanted to direct a Monty Python musical?
A. It made perfect sense to me - maybe because I know him but also because I grew up listening to his albums with Elaine May, which are also quite loopy and insane.
Q. When you read for "Spamalot" last April, had you already been slotted into the parts you'd end up playing?
A. Yes: essentially the parts that Eric Idle played in the movie. So, I got to sit next to him in this reading and do his parts, which was just stupid.
Q. Has he constantly been annoying you with instructions on how to be more like him?
A. He's just been hideous throughout the entire process.
Q. Considering that you're a minimalist by your own definition, can you maintain a less-is-more approach despite the hugeness of the form?
A. Yes, absolutely. Early on in Chicago, where we tried out, Mike said: "If you feel that the audience is not coming with you, whatever you do, don't go and get them - it'll just push them away more. Just do the show and they will come to you."
Q. That must have felt like somebody telling you the theme of your life. But this is a show with killer rabbits, dancing knights and a song called "I Am Not Dead Yet." You're beginning to make it sound like Chekhov.
A. Mike really wants it to be no less real than "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - just more singing and funnier.
Q. Hey, I directed you in "Virginia Woolf" in college. Can I take credit for your career? Or take a percentage?
A. I am happy to give you credit.
Q. Were you prepared for the hard labor of being in a big musical?
A. A few years ago, I started taking voice lessons to prepare for certain events I was doing. And I took dance lessons to prepare for "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" with Uta Hagen in 2001, where I played a ballroom dancing instructor who had been a Broadway chorus boy. Before "Spamalot," I went up to twice a week in voice and three times a week on dance. My dance teacher was very patient. Fortunately, it was just she and I in the room because she's seen things that no human being should have to look at.
Q. But did you really feel it was necessary to train yourself in this intense, foreshortened way to do what a chorus boy would do?
A. Yes. I didn't want to walk into rehearsals like the TV actor who's comin' in to do a musical. I wanted to be prepared - out of respect for the form and also out of respect for my body. I wanted to be in shape enough that I could do whatever they asked me to do and not cripple myself.
Q. And did it work?
A. The very first day of rehearsal, Casey Nicholaw, our choreographer, staged the big "Knights of the Round Table" number. He did a demonstration of, oh, probably 16 bars, with 47 steps in each bar. And then he said, "O.K. let's try it." And of course the entire ensemble did it perfectly and when it was over I was still there with one foot in the air. Casey stopped and looked at me and said, "All right, let's go back." And I said, "To California?"
the original article
And Now for Something Completely Different . . .[/b]
By JESSE GREEN
Published: March 6, 2005, NY Times
BEFORE playing the cosmically over-refined psychiatrist Niles Crane for 11 seasons on "Frasier," David Hyde Pierce worked for 11 years as a stage actor in New York and at regional theaters around the country. Before that, when he was just David Pierce (the Screen Actors Guild, already having a member by that name, Hyded him in 1993), he was a theater and English major at Yale - which is where I met him, in 1977. Steady and buttoned-down, with a keen but very dry sense of humor, he was not like the rest of us flamboyant theater types; and yet today, in his first Broadway appearance since his sitcom success, he is starring in perhaps the silliest musical ever: "Monty Python's Spamalot," which is in previews at the Shubert Theater and opens on March 17. Directed by Mike Nichols and also starring Tim Curry and Hank Azaria, "Spamalot" features Mr. Pierce, 45, as not-so-brave Sir Robin (among other roles): singing and dancing, clutching chickens, blessing hand grenades and generally putting his Yale education to good use. On Feb. 14, he took time off from writing Valentine's Day cards for his castmates - yes, really - to talk about how low he's sunk.
JESSE GREEN: When I met you, I don't think anyone would have guessed that you had an interest in performing. You seemed very reserved. In fact, when I first heard that you were doing a small part in an undergrad production of "A Man for All Seasons" --
DAVID HYDE PIERCE: You thought, "Is that wise?"
Q. I was dumbfounded. Did you have to overcome any reticence to present yourself in a theatrical context?
A. Never. In fact, I remember in fourth grade, I would write plays where I got to be Julius Caesar and we'd always do the death scene. I liked to fall down the staircase in my parents' house. Anything dramatic.
Q. When I later saw you in comic material, I thought of Bob Hope or Jack Benny. Did they influence you?
A. My comic influences are more from television - people like Bob Newhart. I was always drawn to a style of comedy that didn't ask for laughs, but just went about its business and allowed people to respond, as opposed to saying, "Look how funny this is." It's a more intimate performance style, meaning that the focus is between you and the other actors, while allowing the audience in. My greatest pleasure onstage or on TV - and it's why I hate doing movies - is to do as little as possible and get the biggest laugh.
Q. The Monty Python style, while it draws on a lot of intellectual and academic references, doesn't seem intimate in the way you're talking about.
A. Actually, Monty Python came on when I was in high school, and was a huge influence on my style of comedy. I remember the first time I saw it: I had come home late from practicing the organ at the church. I had a key to the church because -
Q. Because you were so cool.
A. That's right. Actually, the night of my senior prom, I was playing the organ.
Q. Insert your own joke here.
A. You see, I was destined to be Niles. Anyway, I came home, flipped on the TV and there was this sketch called "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker," in which Michael Palin plays a stockbroker who, on his way to work, fails to notice an angry Zulu warrior, a naked lady and a busload of gas-masked doughboys. It was very funny and very absurd but not played absurdly. No matter how big the event gets in Monty Python - people exploding from eating too much - the actual performance tends to be quite real.
Q. And you were quickly successful taking that approach; for a young actor with serious ambitions, you worked pretty steadily after college. You didn't have too many of the usual out-of-work-actor jobs.
A. I was a tie salesman at Bloomingdale's, and I know for a fact that I sent people's Christmas presents to foreign lands that they weren't supposed to go to. I was just totally inept. But I was lucky. I got to New York in the fall of '81, and in the spring of '82, I got my only waiting job, which was in "Beyond Therapy" on Broadway. It got a terrible review in some big New York paper and closed in a couple of weeks. But I had such a great time, I thought: "Man, if this is what it's like when a show doesn't work, I'm in. As long as the pleasure outweighs the pain, I'll stick with it." And that's still my strategy.
Q. You played several seasons at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Laertes at the Public and went on tour with Peter Brook's "Cherry Orchard" before you moved to California and started working in sitcoms. Did you ever begin to feel, with "Frasier" lasting so long, that you were straying from something you meant to do?
A. Never. I was performing once a week in front of a live audience in writing that was better than virtually any movie script I was ever sent.
Q. But at some point you started thinking about your post-"Frasier" career. Did you go looking for this project in particular?
A. No, it wasn't deliberate. I think it was September of 2003, I was sitting in the green room at "Frasier," when I read a blurb in The New York Times - can I say that? Does that sound like pandering? -
Q. You'll fit right in.
A. - that said Mike Nichols was going to direct a Broadway musical of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And I went directly into my dressing room, picked up the phone, called my agent and said, "Call them and tell them I don't care what the role is, I just want to audition."
Q. You didn't say, "I don't care what starring role it is, I just want to audition"?
A. No, no, no. I didn't care. It was a confluence of several things. I'd been wanting to do a musical; Monty Python was integral to who I was as a performer and everything I learned growing up; and I'd worked with Mike several times and knew he was the best.
Q. Did it surprise you that Mike Nichols - you know, "Angels in America," "Silkwood" Mike Nichols - wanted to direct a Monty Python musical?
A. It made perfect sense to me - maybe because I know him but also because I grew up listening to his albums with Elaine May, which are also quite loopy and insane.
Q. When you read for "Spamalot" last April, had you already been slotted into the parts you'd end up playing?
A. Yes: essentially the parts that Eric Idle played in the movie. So, I got to sit next to him in this reading and do his parts, which was just stupid.
Q. Has he constantly been annoying you with instructions on how to be more like him?
A. He's just been hideous throughout the entire process.
Q. Considering that you're a minimalist by your own definition, can you maintain a less-is-more approach despite the hugeness of the form?
A. Yes, absolutely. Early on in Chicago, where we tried out, Mike said: "If you feel that the audience is not coming with you, whatever you do, don't go and get them - it'll just push them away more. Just do the show and they will come to you."
Q. That must have felt like somebody telling you the theme of your life. But this is a show with killer rabbits, dancing knights and a song called "I Am Not Dead Yet." You're beginning to make it sound like Chekhov.
A. Mike really wants it to be no less real than "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - just more singing and funnier.
Q. Hey, I directed you in "Virginia Woolf" in college. Can I take credit for your career? Or take a percentage?
A. I am happy to give you credit.
Q. Were you prepared for the hard labor of being in a big musical?
A. A few years ago, I started taking voice lessons to prepare for certain events I was doing. And I took dance lessons to prepare for "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks" with Uta Hagen in 2001, where I played a ballroom dancing instructor who had been a Broadway chorus boy. Before "Spamalot," I went up to twice a week in voice and three times a week on dance. My dance teacher was very patient. Fortunately, it was just she and I in the room because she's seen things that no human being should have to look at.
Q. But did you really feel it was necessary to train yourself in this intense, foreshortened way to do what a chorus boy would do?
A. Yes. I didn't want to walk into rehearsals like the TV actor who's comin' in to do a musical. I wanted to be prepared - out of respect for the form and also out of respect for my body. I wanted to be in shape enough that I could do whatever they asked me to do and not cripple myself.
Q. And did it work?
A. The very first day of rehearsal, Casey Nicholaw, our choreographer, staged the big "Knights of the Round Table" number. He did a demonstration of, oh, probably 16 bars, with 47 steps in each bar. And then he said, "O.K. let's try it." And of course the entire ensemble did it perfectly and when it was over I was still there with one foot in the air. Casey stopped and looked at me and said, "All right, let's go back." And I said, "To California?"
the original article
