David Hyde Pierce on Sondheim, the ‘Frasier’ reboot and being ‘Julia’s’ Mr. Child

A theatrical dream team has been assembled for the premiere of “Here We Are,” the final work of Stephen Sondheim based on two Luis Buñuel films.

Audience members at the Shed, the deluxe venue that’s sprung up in the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s far West Side, know a thing or two about Sondheim. They are also well acquainted with the stage actors who are giving their all to the tricky piece he was racing to complete with playwright David Ives before his death in 2021.

However befuddled theatergoers may be by the surrealism of this unusual musical, they can’t help falling under the spell of an ensemble that includes Rachel Bay Jones, Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Denis O’Hare, Amber Gray, Steven Pasquale and, fresh from her star-making turn in the recent Broadway revival of “Parade,” Micaela Diamond.

One actor stands out amid this glorious bounty, exciting the audience not just to entrance applause but also to gasps of glee. When David Hyde Pierce arrives on the scene in the campy regalia of a bishop who has a fetish for ladies’ footwear and serious qualms about his career choice, the exuberance in the house surges audibly.

David Ives, who wrote the book for “Here We Are,” had a ready explanation for the Pierce effect when contacted by email: “The audience knows it’s in expert hands when David enters because David really is an expert. He does comedy the way the Wallendas dance on tightropes fifty feet over our heads. He brings us, in a word, delight. Would that every actual Bishop out there had David’s timing. The whole world would