All David Hyde Pierce has to do is step out on stage, and he gets applause, even before he launches into the idiotic tongue-twister from "The Pirates of Penzance": I am the very model of a modern ...

the maid and mother figure to the pirates), David Hyde Pierce plays both W.S. Gilbert (in a framing device) and, most deliciously, Major General Stanley, that very model of a modern major general.

Pierce showed us one of the Gilbert & Sullivan ... in performing a Gilbert & Sullivan tongue-twister, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General." ...