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Now David Hyde Pierce is on Broadway in a reimagining of a Gilbert and Sullivan classic, and sharing his thoughts with Sunday Morning's Martha Teichner. I recognized early on that doing less was funny, and also was less common. But what I've had to then, especially now doing musical theater, I've been given the opportunity to realize, oh there's more.
You don't have to do less. I'm thinking of Frasier now, and the famous, famous ironing board fire scene. Was that something you did spontaneously, or did you have a comedy model or comedian in the back of your head creating that? That's very physical comedy, but again, with almost no expression. Every moment of that, virtually, was written by the writers in the room who were saying, all right, what's this?
I remember David Lee, one of the creators of the show, was thinking of Mr. Bean, the character Mr. Bean, and thinking of, is there a solo thing that David could do sort of like that? And then they just started tossing ideas back and forth, and that's how that scene was built. Then what I did was find the internal logic to go from one point to the other. So that the audience could see it escalating, but the character couldn't. Yeah, you're always thinking about the iron sitting there, while Niles is distracted. And I think, and I'll be honest, I cannot remember whether it was Kelsey watching the rehearsal, or David Lee who directed the show, but one of them said to me, gave me this great advice. He said, just remember, at any given point, you know it's going to work out. Which is, it's comedy gold, because that is the thing, that instead of, you don't play the urgency of it, you go, oh, I'm going to solve this problem.
And then it just builds, but that's a lesson that I have carried with me in everything. It's about not telling the end of the scene before you get there, and allowing your character to not know it's going to happen, or to expect that things are going to work out. Well, that doesn't seem contrived, even though obviously it was written.
Yeah, even though there are no words in it, it was really well written. And the guy that got to play it knew what he was doing. What did Frasier, for all those years, what did that enable you to do with the rest of your career? The main thing it did was it allowed me to star in a musical on Broadway. When the producers of Frasier decided to end the show in its 11th season, they said, we don't want the network to just suddenly tell us, oh, you're done.
We want to be able to shape a last season. So we all knew that the show was going to end. And hi, Alice. This is Alice the dog. Hi, Alice the dog. I don't know if you can see her on camera, but she just wanted to know why I'm talking and not feeding her. But it's because this is very important.
We're doing the Lord's work here. Are you going to get petted? Are you going to get petted? Oh, yes, I know. You're very cute. You're very cute.
You're never going to get rid of her now. That's okay. So anyway, it enabled you to... Oh, the thing that enabled, yes. So I was sitting in the green room of Frasier and I picked up the New York Times and there was a headline that said, Mike Nichols, who I had worked with, to direct Broadway musical, I wanted to do a musical, I thought that would be the next thing I should do, of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And I put down the paper and I called my agent and I said, I don't care what the part is, I have to be in this.
Because it was everything I either had always loved or wanted to do. And because of the, you know, before I had gone to do Frasier, I didn't do a musical. I don't know that I ever would have been cast in the lead of a musical necessarily, certainly not a Broadway one. But that exposure and name, I had value, you know, to bring audiences in a little bit. But I think that's the first thing it did and that led me to a whole other career in musicals.
I am the very model of a modern major general. You're in Pirates, the Penzance musical as opposed to the Pirates of Penzance. Why is it called Pirates, the Penzance musical? For those who know the Pirates of Penzance, it's a sort of iconic show and I don't think they wanted to offend anyone. But they had this idea based on historical reality that what if Gilbert and Sullivan had traveled the states as they did with the Pirates of Penzance and ended up in New Orleans and were so taken, as anyone who goes to New Orleans is, by the culture that they thought, well, what happens if we just let a little of this jazz and blues and everything into our show and see what happens? So that's why it's not just called the Pirates of Penzance.
It's just meant to, I guess, pique people's curiosity, but also give a little sense to people who know the show what we're talking about. There's absolutely no Penzance in it. There is no Penzance in it.
It gets mentioned a couple of times, but no, it's totally set now in New Orleans. Why is there a need to change around the original Gilbert and Sullivan version? Gilbert and Sullivan has a little bit disappeared from the culture. So they thought, well, what's a reason, what can we do that's different from that?
So I think that's all it was. And finally, the understanding that the original still exists. The original is being done and can still be done, so we weren't trying to say, oh, what a mess that was. Look, we have a better version.
This is just a different flavor. For a lot of people, I think Gilbert and Sullivan, that body of work, is considered anachronistic, maybe even kind of foolish. What's lost as Gilbert and Sullivan seems to be disappearing from our culture? It's a good question, but at the same time, here I am on Broadway in a Gilbert and Sullivan show that people are loving.
So in that sense, it isn't disappearing from the culture. What does Gilbert and Sullivan mean to you? Well, it must mean something, because I'm getting emotional thinking about the question. I guess it's just because it's been threaded through my life for so long. But at so many different parts of my life, it's become, it was there.
The one time I hosted Saturday Night Live, they wrote a GNS parody for me as my opening monologue. It just, I don't know, I guess it's also, you know, I'm doing musical theater now. I didn't do musicals before, and it was when Frasier was ending that I thought, oh, I've never done a Broadway musical.
I mean, that's what should be my next step. But as I think back on all of this music in my life, which was music theater, Gilbert and Sullivan, I realized I had been doing it all along and loving it all along. And so I guess that's why it means a lot to me. Everybody worries about being typecast and 11 seasons of playing Niles and being associated with Frasier. Did you worry about that? I thought about it a lot.
I don't know that I worried about it exactly, but I definitely strategized about it. A movie came along that I did, and it's called The Perfect Host. And it was a movie where the character I played was very much like Niles on Frasier.
He was a wine aficionado and sort of snobby. Then during the course of the movie, you find out he's a complete psychopath and a crazy man, and it's a wild movie. And I thought, this is perfect because it takes people, it takes my character as people know me. And in the course of one movie, completely changes it, and no one went to see it.
So that didn't help. But it was a good idea, and I still like the movie. But anyway, the great thing about the theater is, and the nice thing about coming back to the theater, because Frasier was like the middle third of my career so far. I had the same amount of time starting out in the theater, then going to L.A. and doing TV. And now I've been back doing theater again. And New York is so welcoming. New Yorkers, you know, they say hi to you on the street because they saw your show.
And I'm able to do lots of different things, because theater is a more chameleon-esque kind of medium, where a small group of people are seeing you in one thing, and they love coming to see you in something completely different. We'll have more from our Sunday morning extended interview after this break. Instacart is on a mission to have you not leave the couch this basketball season. Because between the pregame rituals and the postgame interviews, it can be difficult to find time for everything else. So let Instacart take care of your game day snacks or weekly restocks, and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes.
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Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. Why do you think Frazier worked? The writing is the main reason Frazier not only worked, but continues to work.
The reason people still come up to me, the reason people come up to me and say, you know what got me through COVID? Watching Frazier. I watched it beginning to end. It's because the writing was skillful in the sense of the way the characters were drawn and the interactions. But also it wasn't topical for the most part.
And there's great topical humor, but it doesn't last. And then us, the group of us playing the main characters, all the surrounding characters. It was just a kind of magical combination of really talented people. And also we had a good time. For you, if you were watching it chronologically now and looking at the beginning, looking at the middle, looking at the end and so on, how would you say you evolved during the course of those 11 seasons?
Wow. You know, in any pilot episode of a show, the best Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, all of them and Frazier included, you spend a lot of time in the first episodes showing the audience who you are. It's just natural. And both in the writing and in the acting, that starts to ease off. Partially because as actors, you're getting more dimensional.
You're thinking about more things. You're connecting more with the other person than saying, I'm the brother who does this or I'm. And so everything gets richer and subtler as time goes on. And then the best thing in a good show is the audience.
If you've had a good following for a long time, you can play with the audience because they know so much already. Were you a different actor at the end than from the beginning, you think, in any way? I can tell you one very concrete way in which I was different, which was we did somewhere near the end, flashback episodes to when the series started.
So I watched some of the early episodes to see. I remember they had to give me more hair because I had had more hair then. But also my voice had changed. I had been doing I started working on musicals. I had been working with the voice coach. So I had to raise my voice and get back to the way Niles spoke back then because he didn't speak the way I speak now. So that was just, you know, one thing.
And yeah, I evolved. When I was an actor happily doing off-Broadway, Broadway, regional theater, my husband Brian, who had been an actor, had always wanted to write for television. And he decided to go out to L.A. to do that, to try it. And I thought, well, I got to go and see because the time I spent in L.A., I have a sister there.
I'm not sure I love L.A. Let me see what this is like. It was his impulse to change his life that brought me out there. I auditioned for pilot season, auditioned for E.R., didn't get in.
Chicago Hope didn't get in. The very last thing I auditioned for was a Norman Lear sitcom called The Powers That Be. I auditioned for the role of a suicidal congressman and got it. And that led to me doing television and that led to Frasier because the people who cast Frasier saw me on that and said, oh, if you ever want to have a brother for Frasier, this guy looks like him. So it was Brian's continual looking to what's next, what else is possible.
I tend to be someone who is content where I am. And I owe those opportunities, I think, to him. So how did you two meet? Auditions. We were both actors. I read that you only started really speaking openly and publicly about Brian, your husband, after Frasier, maybe three years after Frasier.
Why was that? That's probably chronologically true. In terms of how I experienced it, that's not what it was like. We were, when we went to Los Angeles, open with the people we worked with. Brian came to filmings of the show.
I would go to his show with our neighbors. We lived what I considered to be an open life. And when people would ask me to be on the cover of The Advocate or something like that, I had difficulty with that because I didn't want to be told what I had to say and how I had to say it. In other words, at the time, my feelings about this changed. But at the time, I had a strong feeling like, I just want to be who I am. I remember this specifically. There was a TV Guide interview where they asked, and the question was, are you dating anyone?
Or something like that. And I said very intentionally, I said, my life is an open book. Just don't expect me to read it to you. Because that was my belief. I thought, I'm not going to hide this.
I'm not hiding this. We'd had tabloid people like, oh, I got a call from one of the tabloids in the early, early days. And he called me. It was early in the morning. He said, I'm sorry to call you so early, but your mother said this was the best time to get you at home. And I thought, don't mind me.
Just speak to my mother. And it was the Boston Globe. Not the Boston Globe. It was the Globe. They had found my mom at home, told her that it was the Globe that wanted to speak to me. She thought it was the Boston Globe.
She didn't know from tabloids. Anyway, so we'd already had a little bit of invasion of privacy of that kind. And that's what I was dealing with at the time. Sort of a little bit resenting people saying, well, if you don't do this, then it doesn't count.
Looking back on that, I also understand that the people who really spoke out, the people who did the covers, the people who got up and spoke, they're the real heroes. And I have maybe mixed feelings about how I handled that at the time. But ironically, now I feel like we're in a place where, or until recently, have been in a place where people are much more in the, I don't have to explain my life to you. I'm just who I am. And why don't you go live your own life? Now things are getting more agitated.
And so I think advocacy and outspokenness is becoming more and more essential. You were together for a long time before you got married. Yeah. What did getting married, what was the significance of that to you at the time that you got married, as opposed to being together long before that? We had, I think, roughly we'd been together about 25 years already by the time we got married. But what happened was we were living in LA. We were living in LA, still residents of LA, but we were already back 2008.
I was back here doing theater. So we were kind of living more in New York. And we went back to Los Angeles and went to some friends' weddings. I remember being struck by hearing the judge say, and now by the power of the state of California, I pronounce you married.
There was something about that. And we knew about all of the sort of contingent benefits that marriage confers. But hearing those words, and then a friend of ours looked at us and said, I don't understand why you're not getting married. And we said, well, we feel like it's not really our institution. I mean, we're happy for our friends, we're getting married.
And he said, if you don't do it, why are we doing this? And that is what sort of made us realize that our commitment to each other is not the thing that made marriage irrelevant. It is the thing that made marriage essential. And having a ring as ancient as it is, it means something. It just means something. It's not what's keeping us together. Our friendship and love and work together and our families is what's kept us together.
But I look at that and it means something. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Climate change is threatening the polar bear capital of the world. But there is hope for the people and polar bears of a warming Arctic. Watch the WCCO original on the edge now on the WCCO YouTube channel.
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