“I probably should try to eat a little more,” David Hyde Pierce tells the waiter who just tried to clear his plate of scrambled eggs.
We’re having breakfast in a diner on the Upper West Side. It’s the morning after I’ve just seen Pierce hold the audience at the Todd Haimes Theater in the palm of his hand while playing a dotty, tongue-twisting-and-tangling model of a modern Major General in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical.” In person, Pierce, a self-described introvert, is polite but subdued. Being on stage allows him to exhibit another, scene-stealing side of himself.
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“I probably need the human connection I get from it,” Pierce confesses. “I’m not a hermit, but if we’re going to have people over, it’s usually my husband Brian’s idea.”
As he sips coffee and makes little progress on those eggs, I ask Pierce if that’s why he’s spent so much of the post-“Frasier” part of his career on Broadway.
“As much as I love film and TV, there’s something more completely fulfilling to me about being on stage,” he admits. “As an actor, when you’re in the theater, it ultimately is on you. The whole thing has been designed, all these amazing people have put it together, and there’s the crew that’s keeping it going. There’s the band that’s playing in the pit, but nobody else is editing the performance. It comes down to what you can bring.”
Nobody’s been cutting Pierce out of the frame much since “Frasier,” where he played the title character’s snobbish younger brother Niles for 11 seasons, ending in 2004. A year later, Pierce, who had been a theater actor before achieving sitcom fame, was treading the boards in “Spamalot,” the Mike Nichols-directed adaptation of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The show was a hit and Pierce has rarely left the stage since; he won a Tony for the Kander & Ebb musical comedy “Curtains” and appeared in acclaimed productions of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and “Hello, Dolly!” as Bette Midler’s better half.
“Theater is where I’m most fulfilled, but there wasn’t a master plan,” Pierce says. “I have never had a plan in my life about anything, basically.”
Intentional or not, “Pirates” composers Gilbert & Sullivan has popped up periodically across the course of Pierce’s professional life, perhaps attracted to the gravitational force of his enviable diction. There was a “Frasier” episode that had Pierce and Kelsey Grammer singing a vibrato rendition of “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” as well as Pierce’s 1995 hosting gig on “SNL.” He used his opening monologue on the sketch show to sing a new version of the patter song (this one focused on his nerves about emceeing). But nothing quite compares to the sight of Pierce, in full mutton chops, dancing around in a jazzy revamp of the show’s most iconic number. This version of the operetta exchanges the show’s English seaside setting for New Orleans, and the music gets a refresh along with the backdrops.
Pierce estimates he’s worked on the song for five years before the show premiered. He felt he needed to have it letter-perfect for even the initial readings in order for the number to land.
“Traps have been laid throughout it,” Pierce says. “There’s words in one part of a verse that are the same as another part of a verse, but if you substitute them by accident, then you hit a wall, or you’re repeating something you already said, and you have no idea where to go next.”
It may be tricky to pull off all the word play, but despite its elocutionary perils, “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” is deeply silly. There are puns, double takes, visual gags and fourth-wall breaking bits aplenty, as well as some class satire that survives the cross-Atlantic transposition. Pierce is happy the show allows people to forget their troubles for two hours and change.
“It takes your mind off all this political and societal unrest and just the turmoil and chaos and antipathy and everything else that’s happening in the country right now,” Pierce says. “Everything about the show — from the design to the orchestrations — is just joyful.”
While Pierce has been a theatrical mainstay, he was convinced to return to television for HBO Max’s “Julia,” playing the retired diplomat husband of Julia Child. Despite earning good notices, the show was abruptly cancelled in 2024 after two seasons. Pierce believes that the writing was on the wall after AT&T sold the channel’s parent company to Discovery Media.
“The creators were thinking we could wrap things up with one more season,” Pierce says. “But it’s always tricky when a company gets bought. They thought we were coming back and then we didn’t hear and we didn’t hear and we didn’t hear. So it wasn’t a shock, but it was sad and disappointing.”
It made him think about his experiencing tying things up on “Frasier.” It was the sitcom’s creators who decided to end the series after 11 seasons in order to wrap up the various storylines.
“We wanted to make this decision on our own instead of letting somebody else make it for us,” Pierce says.
That’s partly why Pierce turned down the chance to reprise his role as Niles when Grammer decided to reboot “Frasier” as a Paramount+ show. I ask him if he was worried he was letting Grammer, a friend, down with his decision.
“I did not think it would hinge on my participation. I thought it should move on from what we were doing,” Pierce says. “When ‘Frasier’ happened, he didn’t bring the gang from ‘Cheers.’ It was successful because they made it something different. Creatively, I thought, I have nothing else. I don’t think I’m going to be much fun or be that enthusiastic about returning.”
“Frasier” was canceled by Paramount+ after two seasons, but Grammer is trying to set the show up at another streamer or platform. Pierce is open to doing a guest appearance if the show comes back.
“If there was a reason for me to appear, I’m not against it at all,” he says.
Right now, his focus is on doing eight shows a week, while injecting a Big Easy swing to the Major General’s pomposity. And even Pierce sometimes finds himself falling into those verbal traps while delivering his big number in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical.”
“This was, like, the fourth preview, and I just got lost,” he remembers. “When I got to the first break, which is after, ‘I’m very well accounted to with matters mathematical. I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical, About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a…’ And then there’s a building pause. I’d had several collisions. At that point, I couldn’t hide it.”
So Pierce, painfully aware of the stumbles, turned to the audience and announced, “I’ve been drinking.”
It got a huge laugh. After the show, he quizzed audience members about his gaffe.
“We thought that was all on purpose,” they told him.
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