We see acclaimed actor David Hyde Pierce frequently, most recently as part of the cast on the television show "The Good Wife." With the new musical "It Shoulda Been You" opening Tuesday night at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, Pierce is trying on a whole new role. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following report.

Long before he was winning Emmy and Tony Awards, acting and directing on Broadway, David Hyde Pierce worked was a security guy.

"I used to work security briefly, yeah. People always look so puzzled and shocked and a little bit sad when they hear that," he says. "Back in Saratoga, where I grew up, there's a big performing arts center."

He usually worked nights featuring the New York City Ballet or the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Mishkin: That Philadelphia Orchestra crowd, man, they are insane.
Pierce: They can be tough. If there's a last minute switch and you're doing Schubert and not Schumann, man. If you've ever been beaten with a walker, it's not a pleasant experience.

For more than 30 years, we've seen David Hyde Pierce on stage and screen. Now, he's tackling something new, directing his first Broadway show, the musical "It Shoulda Been You."

We met Pierce on his 56th birthday.

Pierce: That's part of the fun of tackling something new, especially at my advanced age, to go into a whole new aspect of this and not be sure.
Mishkin: For the record, we are the same age, so thank you very much for saying that.
Pierce: You're welcome, old man.
Mishkin: Yeah, thanks.

Pierce was actually looking pretty refreshed for a guy not getting much sleep.

"Even when I'm asleep, I'm not asleep," he says. "Both Brian Hargrove, my husband, who's the book writer and lyricist, and I, even if you're asleep, your mind is constantly going, doing rewrites, re-staging."

Pierce and Hargrove have been together as a couple for more than 30 years, but this is the first time they are working together.

"Through all of that, we were constantly working with each other and advising each other on our various projects, so that by the time we came to literally working together on the same thing, we'd been doing it forever," Pierce says.

This is not the first time he's learned something new at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. This is where he made his Broadway debut in 1982. He recalls the first part of that night, with his mom and dad in the audience, as the stuff of dreams.

"There they were sitting amongst all these celebrities seeing their son in a Broadway show, and I thought, 'Oh, this is OK,'" he says. "And we came here to Sardi's for dinner afterwards, and that was where I met my agent, who is my agent for 30 years. She came up to me at the dinner and said, 'I want to represent you.'"

But what ensued at the opening night party after a bad New York Times review came out was hardly the stuff of dreams.

"By the time I got there, within half an hour of the review coming out, the party was empty," he says. "All the food had been cleared away. All the guests were gone. The playwright and one friend were there in the lobby. That was it. And that was my introduction to the theater in New York."

The world may know him for his 11 seasons on Frasier as Dr. Niles Crane, a role that earned him four Emmy Awards. But in New York, David Hyde Pierce is known as a theater guy.

After Frasier ended, he eschewed several television roles that he felt were too similar to Niles Crane and returned to Broadway to star in "Spamalot."

In 2007, he won a Tony for his performance as Lieutenant Frank Cioffi in "Curtains." Perhaps his fondest memory from Curtains, though, was not the Tony Award, but an observation from an old family friend who saw the show.

"My dad had stopped acting before I was born. He just stopped doing that for whatever reason. And she came up to me afterwards, and she said, 'Oh my God, you're your father.'"

David Hyde Pierce remembers his hometown fondly as a small community with a passion for the arts. He was voted most talented and most likely to succeed in 1977.

Pierce recalls that even in elementary school, his teachers fostered creativity.

"My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Clemens, apparently, I was kind of not living up to what she felt I could achieve, and she talked to my parents about it, and she was the one who would, like, encourage me," he says. "I would put on little plays for, wrangle my fellow students, and we'd do, I found Shakespeare in the library and we'd act out the death of Julius Caesar. We'd do stuff, you know, sketches from Laugh-In that I'd seen the night before. Who does that?"

He headed off to Yale hoping to be a classical pianist, although his folks wanted him to get a broad liberal arts education. They set the bar rather high, citing the life of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"They opened up the encyclopedia to Albert Schweitzer, because Albert Schweitzer was a scientist and he played the organ and he did all these different things, and they were just, you know, trying to emphasize that life is a broad experience, and you should have a broad experience, especially in college," Pierce says.

When he told his folks that he was switching from music to acting, it actually didn't go so badly, for reasons then unbeknownst to Pierce.

"My dad had always wanted to be an actor, and in fact, it turns out years later—I found reviews and stuff—he was an apparently fantastic and very funny amateur actor in Saratoga community theater," Pierce says. "So when I did have the make the call to say, 'Well, I have good news. I'm not going to become a musician. I’m going to be an actor,' it wasn’t like they dropped the phone and collapsed."

He graduated college in 1981. A year later, he was on Broadway.

"It’s not like I thought, "'Oh, great. I've made it. I'm home free.' Especially since the show closed,'" he says.

He has used the forum granted him by his stardom primarily to work for the Alzheimer's Association. His grandfather suffered from the disease, and Pierce says his father had a form of dementia that might have been Alzheimer's.

Pierce long ago grew accustomed to speaking in public, but testifying before Congress about funding Alzheimer's research was different.

"The stakes were so high," he says. "Any of us in the theater, it feels like life and death when you're going on. But that's the difference between it feeling like life and death and it actually being life and death, and that's what we're dealing with with Alzheimer's."

Pierce has returned to his beloved Saratoga to visit theater students at the high school, donate an organ – of the musical kind – at a local church, and to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the place where he once worked security, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

There is an appreciation for the past, both the place that shaped him, and the people on whose shoulders he stands. And there's an excitement for the present. The actor who has taken direction for more than 30 years is now giving it, learning when to offer advice and when to be quiet.

"An idea that you've suggested, which wasn't understood or even agreed with, maybe, if you back off and it was the right idea, it appears. It's like planting a seed, and it grows. And if it wasn't the right idea, then something even better comes up that the actor, or some other actor, develops," Pierce says. "I love that part."