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| David Hyde Pierce and the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) |
At sixty-six, David Hyde Pierce is so slender and light of foot that he can slip on and off a stage like a wraith. As Major-General Stanley in Pirates!: The Penzance Musical, Roundabout Theatre’s reimagined version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nearing the finish of its Broadway run, Hyde Pierce always appears ungrounded, off-balance, but you don’t worry that he might fall over; he seems far more likely to float away. He plays the character, written for the popular D’Oyly Carte comedian George Grossmith – whose 1879 performance parodied the mannerisms of the well-known Sir Garnet Wolseley – as a sly boots hiding behind the façade of a dotard, and he’s so funny that you continue to giggle over him after he’s vanished. He’s like a master vaudevillian who can hold an audience in the palm of his hand with the smallest shift in intonation or the subtlest double take.