It can’t be easy being cast alongside Mark Rylance at the moment. The former Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe won just about every theatre accolade going in the past year for his remarkable performance in Jez Butterworth’s hugely acclaimed play Jerusalem. In Matthew Warchus’s revival of the Laurence Olivier Award-winning comedy La Bête, the talented performer is given the space and time to deliver a 30-minute monologue packed with tricks and party pieces while the rest of the cast, which includes 11-time Emmy nominee and Tony Award-winner David Hyde Pierce, watch on as he steals the show. Surely for a performer of Pierce’s stature, that must grate just a little? Apparently not. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s an extensive interview with David in today’s Independent. Wouldn’t Frasier: the Musical be amazing?!
Stillness is a great quality in an actor, and a rare one. David Hyde Pierce is pretty much still most of the time. We are sitting in his underground dressing room at the Comedy Theatre, where he has just opened, to very favourable reviews, alongside Mark Rylance and Joanna Lumley in La Bête, a rhyming play about 17th-century French actors. Read the rest of this entry »
The good ol’ BBC have come through again – this time with a report about theatre exports from the West End to Broadway, featuring scenes from La Bête and more interviews with David and Mark Rylance. Watch it at the website.
UK people watching the 10 o’clock news on BBC last night might have caught this interesting piece in which the male leads of La Bête discuss American vs British theatre.
Visit the Front Row website to listen to a ten-minute interview about La Bête with David. It’s a great interview (with a great new photo!) but man, I wish journos would stop referring to him as “Hyde Pierce”! It’s like referring to SJP as “Jessica Parker” or NPH as “Patrick Harris” or SMG as … you get the picture.
Interesting interview in today’s Metroin which David discusses the new play, and also his anger at Proposition 8 – which prompted a follow-up article in Digital Spy.
I’m half expecting David Hyde Pierce to be trying to iron his trousers. At the very least I’m hoping for a bit of super-neurotic horseplay. But in a south London rehearsal room, the former Frasier star is almost unrecognisable. He is small and very still. He has a clipped moustache and is sporting an ugly pair of shiny black tracksuit bottoms. Niles would have had a heart attack. Read the rest of this entry »
… in Time Out London. A bit low on quotes for our liking, but some interesting stuff nonetheless.
As George Osborne’s age of austerity looms over the UK like a raincloud, those seeking a bit of consolatory sunshine should head to the Comedy Theatre. There a rather strange little play written in iambic pentameters is threatening to be the hit of the summer. La Bête is set in the Languedoc and takes its comic tone from Molière, but in fact didn’t land on the page till more than three centuries after his death when it sprang from the mind of a young New York playwright called David Hirson. Broadway was unkind to it: it closed after 25 performances, but its producers had enough faith in La Bête to bring it to London where its subsequent critical and commercial success won it the 1992 Olivier Award for Best Comedy. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a great new interview with David in the Culture section of today’s Sunday Times. Enjoy!
Forty-six years ago in Saratoga Springs, New York, a five-year-old boy named David would stand at the top of the stairs and pretend to be shot. His parents, at breakfast, would hear the thudding of their youngest child crashing down the staircase. “I loved the idea of performing death scenes,” he explains. “It is the most dramatic thing you can do.” About 30 years later, David was acting in a television sitcom. He was in a kitchen and, in an attempt to impress the woman he loved, was trying to look cool by hoisting himself onto the counter top. He kept failing. Then he tried so hard, his head crashed into some hanging pans and he toppled over and fell to the floor. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a great new interview from Official London Theatre:
UK people watching the 10 o’clock news on BBC last night might have caught this interesting piece in which the male leads of La Bête discuss American vs British theatre.
Interesting interview in today’s 
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