VARIETY
Friday, September 24, 1999
LEGIT REVIEW
THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE
By David Mermelstein

Reprise! has scored a triumph with its new production of Rodgers & Hart's "The Boys From Syracuse." Despite a check-ered three-ear history, this semi-staged concert series has tastefully revived some wonderful musicals. And this production is best of breed, with an exceptionally talented cast put through their paces by an astute and imaginative director.

Rodgers & Hart's 1938 show, here slightly retooled by playwright David Ives, is one of the glories of the American musical theater: witty, irreverent and sweet. The tuner is, after all, home to such classics as "Falling in Love With Love," "This Can't be Love," "You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea," and "Sing for Your Supper," as well as several other outstanding songs.
Based on Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors," the show concerns two sets of twins accidentally reunited after years of separation. Antipholus (Scott Waara) and his servant Dromio (Jason Graae) have lived in Ephesus for years. Their Syracuse-based siblings, who share the same names, are merely passing through.

But citizens of Ephesus can't tell the visiting Antipholus (Christopher Sieber) and Dromio (Hyde Pierce) from their resident siblings. The confusion is grist for this comic mill, made even funnier, of course, because the "twins" don't really look alike.

But the comedy serves Hart and Rodgers’ words and music, not the other way around. Director Arthur Allan Seidelman (who winningly helmed "Of Thee I Sing" for Reprise! last November) understands this and has paired talent with panache in equal measure.

Still, without the right players, Seidelman's staging would be stylish but insubstantial, and this is Reprise's best cast show since its inaugural production, "Promises, Promises."

At the center are the twin Dromios, played by the droll Hyde Pierce and the flinty Graae. Graae is the better singer, and a more aggressive actor, but the sibtler Hyde Pierce possesses fetching puppy-dog charm.

As the wife of Dromio of Ephesus, standup-turned-Broadway darling Lea DeLaria looks and acts like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, powerfully built and fierce. Her singing matches her persona, evoking memories of Ethel Merman at her brassiest.

Though the rest of the cast is less memorable, they make favorable impressions. Karen Culliver's Adriana, Tia Riebling's Luciana and Ruth Gottschall's Courtesan trill as prettily as they look, which is very nice indeed. The handsome Waara and Seiber handle their parts well, as do John Ganun's Police Sergeant, Charlie Dell's Aegeon, Marian Mercer's sorceress and Gus Corrado's tailor and goldsmith. The chorus boys and girls, including several UCLA students, sing and dance with evident, and infectious, enthusiasm.

Gary Wissmann's production design is your basic scaled-down ancient Greek pillars and pediments, but David Zyla's costumes blend tunic wear with high fashion in a sly, eye-catching manner. And Travis Payne's delightfully loopy choreography, full of homages to styles past. Lends glitzy energy to the proceedings.

In a show of many highlights, "Sing For Your Supper," with DeLaria complementing Culliver and Riebling, emerges as does "He and She," with DeLaria and Hyde Pierce in endearing comic form.
In fact, there isn't a single song that falls flat. A good part of the credit goes to music director Peter Matz and his 14-piece band.



LOS ANGELES TIMES
September 5,1999
DAVID HYDE PIERCE
HE'S GOT PLENTY OF NERVE
By Sean Mitchell

As David Hyde Pierce begins his seventh season on "Frasier," he is also attempting a real stretch: singing before a live audience.

Opening Sept. 22, for a two-week run, for instance, he will be onstage at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA performing in his first musical comedy, a Reprise! Best of Broadway production of "The Boys From Syracuse."

Hyde Pierce turned 40 in April and hasn't been in a musical since high school, when he shared a role with another student in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" back in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In order to do "The Boys from Syracuse," a 1938 Rodgers & Hart adaptation of Shakespeare's "A Comedy of Errors," Hyde Pierce will have to make some daily clock-watching commutes from the "Frasier" set to UCLA and back for about a month.

"He's leaving the studio at 12, and I need him at 12:30, so let's hope there's no traffic," says "Boys" director Arthur Allan Seidelman about the daunting scheduling logistics facing the "Frasier" co-star."

So how did he get cast in a musical without anyone knowing if he could sing?

Hyde Pierce is humble about this, mentioning that he is training hard with an eminent vocal coach and that he took some encouragement from an evening a few years ago at the STAGE benefit for AIDS funding when he was asked to sing. "They had a night of Cole Porter and asked me to do something, and I said, 'Look, I don't really sing.' But they found this great little song called 'Thank You So Much, Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby' which is not frequently done...
"I had such a good time doing it. And also, I sang and wasn't bored."

Marcia Seligson, the producer of the Reprise! Broadway's Best in Concert series (in which Grammer also moonlighted in "Sweeney Todd" last spring) says she met Hyde Pierce at the opening night party for "Sweeney Todd" and asked him to think about doing a show with her. "I knew he wanted to sing because he was studying with Calvin Remsberg," she says.
Indeed, he has a musical background, having studied to be a concert pianist before learning at Yale he wasn't cut for it.

At Yale, he moved into acting and went from there, yet until now he never found his way into a musical, which, he says, is one of the reasons he accepted the offer for "The Boys From Syracuse."

"I'm woefully ignorant about musical theatre. I had just read Michael Feinstein's autobiography - Gershwin expert - and along with being a good autobiography, it's also a great textbook on the history of the American musical. I was discovering all this stuff I hadn't known about the early musicals, and then this call comes about 'The Boys From Syracuse,' which is an early musical."
The show, which includes the songs "Falling in Love With Love," "This Can't Be Love" and "Sing for Your Supper," retained the toga dress and period setting in Roman antiquity of Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors."

If it's not as well known as "Guys and Dolls," that's part of the point of the Reprise! series, to revive shows that have been neglected through the years and deserve another hearing, if only a concert (i.e. not a full staging) setting.

Hyde Pierce will play Dromio, one of two twins (Jason Graae plays the other) whose identities keep getting mixed up as they match romantic wits with another pair of twins (played by Karen Culliver and Lea DeLaria).

Says Hyde Pierce: "It's basically a comedy of mistaken identity, and end up having to service the woman who is insatiable and she's married to my twin, and she thinks I'm him and so I become exhausted."

"He's perfect for this role," Seidelman says. "He's got the kind of spirit and bounce and humor and warmth that we need. The big ballads in the show are sung by other people with big voices. We're not asking him to be Ezio Pinza."

 

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