Post by lemur on Jan 1, 2008 19:42:49 GMT -5
Curtains call
Richard Ouzounian
The former Niles Crane speaks candidly on his new Broadway role, his love of acting and the terrible disease that has ravaged his family
Apr 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Richard Ouzounian
Theatre critic
He's not at all like Niles. That's the first thing to report about David Hyde Pierce, who is currently delighting Broadway audiences with his performance as showbiz-obsessed detective Lieut. Frank Cioffi in the musical Curtains.
Banish all images you might have had about the role Pierce played for 11 seasons on Frasier as Kelsey Grammer's elitist, arrogant, terminally needy brother.
The real guy is totally different: kind of like the college roommate you always wanted (and never had) – quiet, considerate, charming and intelligent.
He sits back in his comfortable, neat (but not Niles-obsessive neat) dressing room, wearing a grey tracksuit from Harvard Medical School.
Theatre, naturally enough, is on his mind today and he thinks back to the first show he remembers while growing up in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
"When I was about 6," he recalls, "they built a new performing arts centre that was the summer home of the New York City Ballet. The first thing I saw was Balanchine's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it remains indelibly imprinted on my mind. I got the feeling of the kind of magic that could happen on a stage."
Pierce kept acting throughout elementary school ("mainly in scenes my friends and I ripped off from Laugh-In," he gleefully recalls), with a bittersweet triumph in seventh grade.
"I got to star in the title role in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," he begins proudly, only to have the disappointment of nearly 40 years ago drift across his face.
"But I only played it in Act I," he adds wistfully, "because there were so many kids in class that they had to split everything up."
Whether or not that had anything to do with it, Pierce switched his artistic allegiance in adolescence and devoted himself to music.
"I was a classical pianist and spent most of my time accompanying choirs and vocalists or playing the organ at church concerts."
He went off to Yale to study music but "I found out pretty quickly the music profession wasn't for me. I wasn't talented enough to pursue it and not interested enough to pursue it, which I guess goes hand-in-hand. And so I started doing theatre again, just for fun," he says, with his face brightening.
He began taking courses and found himself loving it, spending his summers acting at the prestigious Williamstown Festival, where "I'd be on stage with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella and Colleen Dewhurst and see what real actors did."
When he graduated from Yale, he was going to continue studying in England, but actor Edward Herrmann told him, "You've already spent all this time and money in school. Why don't you just go to New York, and see if you like it?"
Pierce followed his advice and wound up almost immediately in the Broadway production of Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy, where "I worked with John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest, just osmosing (if that's the right word) all they do."
After that, it was a typical actor's life. Sometimes selling ties at Bloomingdale's, sometimes going off to regional theatres like the Guthrie in Minneapolis where he did "an outrageous production of The Seagull where we began with the fourth act and then did the rest of the show as a flashback."
Returning to New York, he got to play Laertes opposite Kevin Kline's Hamlet and appeared in the hit production of the late Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles.
"That was such a wonderful experience," he recalls, "that I thought, `This is as good as it gets in N.Y., so I'd better try something else.'"
He went out to the West Coast to do TV and film work, landing a lead in Norman Lear's acclaimed but short-lived series, The Powers That Be, and playing parts like Meg Ryan's brother in Sleepless in Seattle.
And then came Frasier, the Cheers spin-off that lasted an amazing 11 seasons and won a record-breaking 39 Emmy Awards, four of which went to Pierce.
"I was very fulfilled doing Frasier," says Pierce with a sweet smile. "The scripts were consistently as good as anything I've ever gotten in my career and the people were a joy to work with.
"It was actually a theatrical experience for me. Recording before a live audience had all the spontaneity of theatre and so many of the cast were theatre veterans, I felt like I was doing a play."
When the series was finally over, he wisely decided to move into the field of Broadway musicals "because it was the one area I'd never explored at all."
His turn as the timorous Sir Robin, who learned to embrace Broadway musicals, was one of the major joys of Spamalot and set the stage for his current stint in Curtains.
"I have a line in the show," he shares, "where I say, `Putting on a musical has got to be the most fulfilling thing a person could ever hope to do.' Before Spamalot, I would have found those sentiments kind of sketchy, but now I know there's truth in it, because a musical is about a group of human beings who go to the absolute limit of their potential for the sheer love of it and the joy of sharing it with an audience.
"I'm committed to Curtains for a year," he concludes, "and after that, we'll see where life has brought me. I don't plan my career. I don't have a lot of ambition. I just love what I do."
Another important side of Pierce's personality is his tireless work on behalf of Alzheimer's awareness and research, which stems from the fact both his grandfather and father died of the disease."I find it frustrating," says Pierce of the public's unwillingness to become aware of the magnitude of the problem. "No one sees the tidal wave of Alzheimer's that's coming because of the baby-boomer generation.
"We've just hit five million victims in (America) and all projections indicate it's going to be 16 million in a few years. Those are bad numbers because it's a horrible disease and it has a huge ripple effect around the person who's sick."
You can see the pain in Pierce's eyes as he talks of a scenario far too familiar to him. "Not only is the person you loved dying, but all of the memories you shared are disappearing as well. It's a fiendishly complicated disease."
He tries for a moment of gallows humour.
"Bird flu is easy to explain. It spreads, everyone dies, people go into a panic. But Alzheimer's ..."
He reaches for the words but can't find them. He sits quietly for a moment.
"The only good thing about the disease," he says when he finds his voice again, "is that it's its own worst enemy, because it's so terrible."
Since Alzheimer's runs so strongly in his family, the question must be asked if Pierce is worried about eventually getting it himself.
"Every time I forget a name or where I put my keys, I wonder for a second if this is it. But I'm only 48 now, and it didn't happen to my father and grandfather until they were in their 80s.
"No, I don't worry about it. I just hate it. And it keeps growing and growing, so we have to do everything we can to fight it."
Frasier stars no strangers to the Great White Way
David Hyde Pierce isn't the only cast member of Frasier with a flair for the Broadway stage. Here are examples of how the show's leads have all trod the boards in New York.
KELSEY GRAMMER
(Frasier Crane): Appeared as Cassio opposite Christopher Plummer's Iago in Othello (1992). Got appalling reviews playing the title role of Macbeth (2000). Was well-received as Henry Higgins in a concert version of My Fair Lady with the New York Philharmonic earlier this season.
JOHN MAHONEY
(Martin Crane): A longtime member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where he starred in Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, which he later played at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. Mahoney is currently appearing on Broadway in the revival of Prelude to a Kiss.
JANE LEEVES (Daphne Moon): Originally trained as a ballet dancer in her native England and appeared almost exclusively in TV and movies until she made her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles in the long-running revival of Cabaret in 2002.
PERI GILPIN (Roz Doyle): Began her drama studies at the Dallas Theatre Center, later continuing her education in England. She has appeared at the Williamstown Festival and off-Broadway in the hit 1997 comedy As Bees In Honey Drown.
BEBE NEUWIRTH (Lilith Sternin): A longtime Broadway baby, Neuwirth starred in A Chorus Line, Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees!, Fosse and the smash revival of Chicago, where she played Velma. She is now on Broadway in the revival's 10th year as Roxie.
Richard Ouzounian
The former Niles Crane speaks candidly on his new Broadway role, his love of acting and the terrible disease that has ravaged his family
Apr 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Richard Ouzounian
Theatre critic
He's not at all like Niles. That's the first thing to report about David Hyde Pierce, who is currently delighting Broadway audiences with his performance as showbiz-obsessed detective Lieut. Frank Cioffi in the musical Curtains.
Banish all images you might have had about the role Pierce played for 11 seasons on Frasier as Kelsey Grammer's elitist, arrogant, terminally needy brother.
The real guy is totally different: kind of like the college roommate you always wanted (and never had) – quiet, considerate, charming and intelligent.
He sits back in his comfortable, neat (but not Niles-obsessive neat) dressing room, wearing a grey tracksuit from Harvard Medical School.
Theatre, naturally enough, is on his mind today and he thinks back to the first show he remembers while growing up in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
"When I was about 6," he recalls, "they built a new performing arts centre that was the summer home of the New York City Ballet. The first thing I saw was Balanchine's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it remains indelibly imprinted on my mind. I got the feeling of the kind of magic that could happen on a stage."
Pierce kept acting throughout elementary school ("mainly in scenes my friends and I ripped off from Laugh-In," he gleefully recalls), with a bittersweet triumph in seventh grade.
"I got to star in the title role in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," he begins proudly, only to have the disappointment of nearly 40 years ago drift across his face.
"But I only played it in Act I," he adds wistfully, "because there were so many kids in class that they had to split everything up."
Whether or not that had anything to do with it, Pierce switched his artistic allegiance in adolescence and devoted himself to music.
"I was a classical pianist and spent most of my time accompanying choirs and vocalists or playing the organ at church concerts."
He went off to Yale to study music but "I found out pretty quickly the music profession wasn't for me. I wasn't talented enough to pursue it and not interested enough to pursue it, which I guess goes hand-in-hand. And so I started doing theatre again, just for fun," he says, with his face brightening.
He began taking courses and found himself loving it, spending his summers acting at the prestigious Williamstown Festival, where "I'd be on stage with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella and Colleen Dewhurst and see what real actors did."
When he graduated from Yale, he was going to continue studying in England, but actor Edward Herrmann told him, "You've already spent all this time and money in school. Why don't you just go to New York, and see if you like it?"
Pierce followed his advice and wound up almost immediately in the Broadway production of Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy, where "I worked with John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest, just osmosing (if that's the right word) all they do."
After that, it was a typical actor's life. Sometimes selling ties at Bloomingdale's, sometimes going off to regional theatres like the Guthrie in Minneapolis where he did "an outrageous production of The Seagull where we began with the fourth act and then did the rest of the show as a flashback."
Returning to New York, he got to play Laertes opposite Kevin Kline's Hamlet and appeared in the hit production of the late Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles.
"That was such a wonderful experience," he recalls, "that I thought, `This is as good as it gets in N.Y., so I'd better try something else.'"
He went out to the West Coast to do TV and film work, landing a lead in Norman Lear's acclaimed but short-lived series, The Powers That Be, and playing parts like Meg Ryan's brother in Sleepless in Seattle.
And then came Frasier, the Cheers spin-off that lasted an amazing 11 seasons and won a record-breaking 39 Emmy Awards, four of which went to Pierce.
"I was very fulfilled doing Frasier," says Pierce with a sweet smile. "The scripts were consistently as good as anything I've ever gotten in my career and the people were a joy to work with.
"It was actually a theatrical experience for me. Recording before a live audience had all the spontaneity of theatre and so many of the cast were theatre veterans, I felt like I was doing a play."
When the series was finally over, he wisely decided to move into the field of Broadway musicals "because it was the one area I'd never explored at all."
His turn as the timorous Sir Robin, who learned to embrace Broadway musicals, was one of the major joys of Spamalot and set the stage for his current stint in Curtains.
"I have a line in the show," he shares, "where I say, `Putting on a musical has got to be the most fulfilling thing a person could ever hope to do.' Before Spamalot, I would have found those sentiments kind of sketchy, but now I know there's truth in it, because a musical is about a group of human beings who go to the absolute limit of their potential for the sheer love of it and the joy of sharing it with an audience.
"I'm committed to Curtains for a year," he concludes, "and after that, we'll see where life has brought me. I don't plan my career. I don't have a lot of ambition. I just love what I do."
Another important side of Pierce's personality is his tireless work on behalf of Alzheimer's awareness and research, which stems from the fact both his grandfather and father died of the disease."I find it frustrating," says Pierce of the public's unwillingness to become aware of the magnitude of the problem. "No one sees the tidal wave of Alzheimer's that's coming because of the baby-boomer generation.
"We've just hit five million victims in (America) and all projections indicate it's going to be 16 million in a few years. Those are bad numbers because it's a horrible disease and it has a huge ripple effect around the person who's sick."
You can see the pain in Pierce's eyes as he talks of a scenario far too familiar to him. "Not only is the person you loved dying, but all of the memories you shared are disappearing as well. It's a fiendishly complicated disease."
He tries for a moment of gallows humour.
"Bird flu is easy to explain. It spreads, everyone dies, people go into a panic. But Alzheimer's ..."
He reaches for the words but can't find them. He sits quietly for a moment.
"The only good thing about the disease," he says when he finds his voice again, "is that it's its own worst enemy, because it's so terrible."
Since Alzheimer's runs so strongly in his family, the question must be asked if Pierce is worried about eventually getting it himself.
"Every time I forget a name or where I put my keys, I wonder for a second if this is it. But I'm only 48 now, and it didn't happen to my father and grandfather until they were in their 80s.
"No, I don't worry about it. I just hate it. And it keeps growing and growing, so we have to do everything we can to fight it."
Frasier stars no strangers to the Great White Way
David Hyde Pierce isn't the only cast member of Frasier with a flair for the Broadway stage. Here are examples of how the show's leads have all trod the boards in New York.
KELSEY GRAMMER
(Frasier Crane): Appeared as Cassio opposite Christopher Plummer's Iago in Othello (1992). Got appalling reviews playing the title role of Macbeth (2000). Was well-received as Henry Higgins in a concert version of My Fair Lady with the New York Philharmonic earlier this season.
JOHN MAHONEY
(Martin Crane): A longtime member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where he starred in Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, which he later played at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. Mahoney is currently appearing on Broadway in the revival of Prelude to a Kiss.
JANE LEEVES (Daphne Moon): Originally trained as a ballet dancer in her native England and appeared almost exclusively in TV and movies until she made her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles in the long-running revival of Cabaret in 2002.
PERI GILPIN (Roz Doyle): Began her drama studies at the Dallas Theatre Center, later continuing her education in England. She has appeared at the Williamstown Festival and off-Broadway in the hit 1997 comedy As Bees In Honey Drown.
BEBE NEUWIRTH (Lilith Sternin): A longtime Broadway baby, Neuwirth starred in A Chorus Line, Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees!, Fosse and the smash revival of Chicago, where she played Velma. She is now on Broadway in the revival's 10th year as Roxie.