David Hyde Pierce on Sondheim, the 'Frasier' reboot and being 'Julia's' Mr. Child
A theatrical dream team has been assembled for the premiere of “Here We Are,” the final work of Stephen Sondheim based on two Luis Bu?uel films.
Audience members at the Shed, the deluxe venue that’s sprung up in the Hudson Yards on Manhattan's far West Side, know a thing or two about Sondheim. They are also well acquainted with the stage actors who are giving their all to the tricky piece he was racing to complete with playwright David Ives before his death in 2021.
However befuddled theatergoers may be by the surrealism of this unusual musical, they can’t help falling under the spell of an ensemble that includes Rachel Bay Jones, Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Denis O'Hare, Amber Gray, Steven Pasquale and, fresh from her star-making turn in the recent Broadway revival of "Parade," Micaela Diamond.
One actor stands out amid this glorious bounty, exciting the audience not just to entrance applause but also to gasps of glee. When David Hyde Pierce arrives on the scene in the campy regalia of a bishop who has a fetish for ladies’ footwear and serious qualms about his career choice, the exuberance in the house surges audibly.
David Ives, who wrote the book for "Here We Are," had a ready explanation for the Pierce effect when contacted by email: “The audience knows it's in expert hands when David enters because David really is an expert. He does comedy the way the Wallendas dance on tightropes fifty feet over our heads. He brings us, in a word, delight. Would that every actual Bishop out there had David's timing. The whole world would convert. He also, and this is the heart of the matter, he also has a preternatural sweetness that people just fall in love with. He's perfect for the Bishop in 'Here We Are' because so much of him truly is the Bishop: humane, thoughtful, and generous.”
Pierce is widely beloved for playing Niles Crane on the sitcom “Frasier,” a role that won him four Emmy Awards. But New York audiences know him as a regular stage performer who returned to the theater following "Frasier" to be in the original Broadway company of “Spamalot.” Since then, he's won a Tony for his role in the musical “Curtains,” starred as sad-sack Vanya in Christopher Durang's Tony-winning "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" (and directed a cracking good production of the Chekhov-inspired farce at the Mark Taper Forum), rollicked alongside Bette Midler in the 2017 Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” and magisterially balanced the hilarity and grief of "A Life," an off-Broadway curio by playwright Adam Bock about the dire fate of a lonely gay man obsessed with astrology. His other stage credits further attest to his impeccable taste.
Actors are lucky if they have one TV series that takes off. Pierce is starring in another, Max’s “Julia,” in which he plays Paul Child, the sensitive husband of cooking eminence Julia Child (portrayed by the great Sarah Lancashire). This show may not have the same reach as the one that made him a household name, but when he was approached to do the reboot of “Frasier” on Paramount+, his plate was so full of meaningful projects that he didn’t want to give any of them up.
“I never really wanted to go back,” he admitted on a recent November morning in the lobby of the Shed before a matinee performance. “It’s not like I said, ‘Oh, I don't ever want to do that again.’ I loved every moment. It was that I wanted to do other things. And when we got into real talks about the reboot, I had just started on the ‘Julia’ TV show and was working on a musical and going to do another musical, not this one. And I just thought, 'I don't want to be committed to a show and not be able to do stuff like this.' And I also thought, 'They don't actually need me.' Frasier has moved on to a new world. They have new characters. And I think I'm right. It's doing great. And the new people they have are great.”
Pierce has been so in demand that he almost missed out on being part of "Here We Are." Director Joe Mantello had written to Pierce a couple years ago about doing a reading of the musical, but he was in Boston filming "Julia" and had to decline.
“I wrote him back and said, ‘I’ve never been so happy to be employed in my life,'" he recalled. "I didn’t know anything about the show at the time. And then I think it was this past March that he came back to me and said, 'We're looking to do a production. Would you be interested?'"
A script was sent, and two things stood out for Pierce. His character, the bishop, has a comic gem of a song in the first act, in which he explains why he’s miscast as a member of the clergy. And in the second act, he has a crucial existential colloquy with Marianne, Rachel Bay Jones’ wealthy airhead, who reveals a surprising amount of depth in a philosophical back and forth with her uncertain confessor.
“They sent me a recording of Alexander Gemignani, our music director, singing the song,” Pierce said while sipping coffee. “Alex has one of the finest tenors in the business. So hearing him sing it made me think I’m doomed. But he’s also a very good music director, and we found a key for me to do it. And then there’s a very important scene with the character Marianne in the second act. And those two things, aside from just the gift of being asked to be part of what turned out to be Sondheim's last show, there was no question in my mind about doing it.”
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“Here We Are,” which is constructed as a musical diptych, stitches together two unrelated yet thematically resonant Bu?uel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” In the musical’s first act, a gaggle of wealthy friends shows up at the posh New York aerie of Marianne and Leo (Cannavale) expecting brunch and finding nothing prepared. The group hits the road in search of a meal that always seems out of reach. In the second act, the party is stranded in a room at an embassy after a feast that has left them feeling full yet unsatisfied. The situation evokes both Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” where hell is defined as other people, and a perkier than usual episode of "The Twilight Zone."
The first half of "Here We Are" is guided by Sondheim’s music, much of it tantalizingly derivative (with strong echoes of “Company” and “Into the Woods"). The music, however, subsides in the second half, transforming this much anticipated Sondheim swan song into an absurdist drama.
Pierce’s number is the witty high point of Act 1 (along with O’Hare’s comic turns as a series of uncooperative waiters). The Bishop confesses in song, “Well, I could use a job, / You could give me a job, / I’m a terrible priest.” And Pierce, maximizing the situational drollery, treats the character as though he were kin to one of the Gilbert & Sullivan figures he performed with aplomb in his apprenticeship days.
The issue of whether “Here We Are” represents a finished work has become an open debate in theater circles. For Pierce, this was not an overriding concern.
“It wasn’t so much a question of whether this was unfinished,” he said. “It was more a question of what is this. Because it’s not just Steve’s music. It’s also David Ives’ book, and the interaction between them. One of the great strengths of the production is that all the people in charge — Joe, Sam Pinkleton, our choreographer, Alex — were willing to watch what happened in rehearsal, all the while maintaining, either consciously or unconsciously or supernaturally, this sense of whatever Steve was going for.”
One of the toughest challenges was figuring out how the two halves of “Here We Are” interlock. Pierce said that if you were to just look at the second half independent of the first, you might think you were in “an O’Neill play.” But he quickly clarified that this was not what Ives was going for.
“He told us that he’s not a naturalistic writer and that this is not a heaven-on-pause kind of thing,” Pierce said. What links the parts, in his view, “is an overarching rhythm, a drive,” which the music establishes in the first half and continues throughout, despite the noticeable drop-off in songs.
“It feels like this is typical Sondheim in that it's something we’ve never seen before,” he said.
In person, Pierce is gently disarming, with none of the intellectual pretension of Niles Crane. He wears his erudition lightly, like a comfortable pair of khakis, even when making a comparison between Sondheim's work on "Here We Are" and late Beethoven or confessing (when asked about his own piano skills) that he plays a piece by Bach and Beethoven every day.
“Beethoven went through all these different periods, and we all know some of the most popular tunes that he wrote,” Pierce said. “At the end of his life, with string quartets and things, he was in a very gnarly, complicated, forward-looking musical world. And I think that’s where Steve is in this. You hear, of course, the elements of everything he’s ever written. But there’s also, in the harmony and in the dissonance, something else going on. And as we were just saying, it’s kind of a musical but it's also kind of a play, but it's both or neither or something. He created a new thing."
Pierce attributes some of the piece's structural irregularities to the Bu?uel films. Their union, hardly a shotgun marriage, makes sense conceptually. But stylistic differences seep through.
“'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,' which is our first act, is a very colorful, lighthearted social commentary from the 1970s,” he said. “‘The Exterminating Angel,’ our second act, is an interesting black-and-white film from the ’60s that has no underscoring. Steve got to a certain point in the second act and was having trouble writing music for the rest of it. David and Joe were the ones that came to him and said, ‘Is it possible there’s a reason? Maybe these people shouldn’t be singing about whatever is going on.’ I don’t know that they were thinking about the Bu?uel at the time but that jibes with the filmmaker’s own instincts.”
Because Sondheim was not around for the rehearsal process, it’s impossible to say whether he would have thought the musical had attained something approximating final form. But he no doubt would have responded to the collective devotion that went into realizing his last work.
For Pierce, being entrusted with a new Sondheim song was both a tremendous honor and a tremendous responsibility. “The first time I sang the song with the orchestra, there was so much whimsy in Jonathan Tunick’s orchestration that I kept laughing,” Pierce recalled. “And not because of what I was doing but because of these little stings and blips and things that he had put in.”
The contrast between the character’s state of crisis and the jaunty music instructed Pierce on how the song should be performed. “OK, here’s a guy who is in real trouble,” he said. “He’s been in real pain. He’s lost. He’s at the height of the church, and he’s dressed like a wedding cake. Yet something profound is missing. Tunick’s orchestration reminded me that that's not how he’s presenting himself. He’s presenting himself as someone who wants to be liked, as someone who wants to make a sale, whether it’s to give people religious counsel or just find another way to approach life. So it’s pretty essential Sondheim, almost ‘Send in the Clowns’-y in that what he’s saying is covering a real need.”
Has there been a classic Sondheim role he’s been hankering to do? The question prompts Pierce to remember the transformative experience of seeing when he was an undergraduate at Yale the original Broadway production of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," starring Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou.
"I actually went back to see it one more time," he said. "It was a Sunday matinee. And it happened to be their last performance, which I didn't know at the time. And they were just kind of loopy with each other. But I know in retrospect what a privilege it was to have been at that moment. I would never be cast in it and probably couldn't sing it, but Sweeney is a role that I looked at and thought, 'Oh, I love that part.'”
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It's possible to still see the undergrad in the beloved veteran actor, despite the thinning hair and superficial dents of time. Like Paul Child, his character on "Julia," Pierce seems happy to embrace whatever new adventure life throws his way. Vanity and anxious control, the occupational hazards of acting, aren't dictating his choices. Ambling gracefully into the future with a look of "Oh, gosh!" gratitude, he retains just enough irony to seem sincere.
Pierce hopes that "Julia" will have a third season, but he'd rather talk about the canniness of Lancashire's portrayal of Julia Child. He holds it as a mark of a first-rate talent that she is doing her own version of the character.
"She has obviously studied the woman, but she allows it to be a three-dimensional human being," he said. "Years ago, I did Oliver Stone's movie 'Nixon.' Anthony Hopkins played Nixon, and I remember having the same feeling. Back in the ’70s, impressionists used to do Nixon, and they were probably more accurate. But there was something in the way he captured the internal spirit, the wants and needs and the shape of the character. It's really interesting how as an actor you parse that balance and make those choices, and I think she's done it perfectly."
"Julia" is inspiring to anyone of a certain age who would like to believe that their second act doesn't have to be inferior to their first. Aging isn't disqualifying but rather a spur to keep living. Middle-age bodies are displayed without apology. Pierce described the show as "more European" in attitude.
Research into his character at Harvard University, where Julia Child's papers are kept, has only deepened his love for Paul Child, the husband and former civil servant who was, in Pierce's view, "an incredible visual artist." But it's the complexity of the marriage between the retired diplomat and the television cooking sensation that fascinates him.
"Paul introduced her to the world of France and French cooking," he said. "She was from high-end Pasadena, and wasn't really aware of that. And then when she took off, he was just right there for her. What I like about the show is its willingness to explore that, even though they were a mutually supportive couple, they were also two very strong personalities. And there's no way there weren't conflicts. For him to give her the limelight and be her bottle-washer, it had to hurt."
Pierce's attitude toward his own career suggests that a light touch might be the secret not only to success but also to sanity. The reviews for "Here We Are," which runs through Jan. 21 at the Shed, have been respectful. No Broadway plans have been announced, and he's at peace if the run ends here.
"First of all, we all love doing the show," he said. "We love each other and are having the best time. But the way it was presented to me originally, when they first came to me, Joe [Mantello] said, 'Look, we are not doing this to move it. We are not doing this as a commercial production. We're doing this for Steve.' And I think that's how we all feel. I'm not a producer on this, so I'm not involved in any other discussions. But I guess I could say that if this ends up being it, it will have been worth it."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
