David Alan Grier of "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess" As a Yale-trained actor as well as a stand-up comedian used to shutting up yahoos in the audience, David Alan Grier rarely feels rattled onstage. But he was nearly beside himself during a recent performance of "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess," the Broadway musical in which he plays the drug dealer Sporting Life, a role most identified with Cab Calloway and Sammy Davis Jr. Every time Mr. Grier entered a scene, strutting like a peacock among the poor of Catfish Row, the same young woman in the audience burst out giggling. "Some people think I play for laughs, that I'm just "In Living Color," " he recalled in an interview the other day, referring to the popular sketch-comedy series that ran on Fox from 1990 to 1994 and also starred the Wayans brothers and Jim Carrey. But I never wanted to be a comic. I wanted to be a leading man - the black lawyer, the black doctor, the black policeman. After the show the woman came backstage. It turned out that she was on a group outing of recovering addicts and former prostitutes. But when she asked Mr. Grier for a hug, he was still smarting and wanted to know why she laughed. "I knew him," the woman said, according to Mr. Grier, referring to all the Sporting Lifes who had hobbled her with cocaine. Mr. Grier could relate. And of course he hugged her. Growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, he couldn't help seeing the flashily dressed rakes in red convertible Eldorados, men who became his source material for Sporting Life. Back then, Mr. Grier said, his parents kept him from drifting too close to the danger. His father, William H. Grier, was a psychiatrist and co-author of the book "Black Rage," about the lasting damage of slavery and social oppression, and the elder Mr. Grier made a point of sowing seeds of self-esteem in his three children. "Daddy was always telling us about music, movies, people who were part of our history, and "Porgy and Bess" was part of that," said Mr. Grier, 55, over a preshow dinner of pizza and broccoli in the theater district. He played the Gershwin music a lot. And we had silhouettes of Sporting Life in the house. My dad would say, "These are important things." " In 1963, at 6, Mr. Grier marched with his family behind the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Detroit, and at 15 he tried to join the Black Panther Party. He was rejected as too young. Theater was not appealing. "Musicals were men in tights, "Godspell," not cool," Mr. Grier said. He wanted to be a musician and dropped out of the University of Michigan to move to New York. Club acts never brought fame, yet Mr. Grier's showmanship did prompt people to urge him to try acting. He returned to Ann Arbor and tried out for campus plays; his first performance was as "the other black guy" in "Othello" (a solider with one line). Skill and his audition proved enough for admission to the master's program at the Yale School of Drama. "I never wanted to lose out on an acting job and wonder if I hadn't been trained enough," he said. Just months after graduation, Mr. Grier had his big break: His Broadway debut was as Jackie Robinson in "The First," a 1981 musical about Robinson's smashing baseball's color barrier. The show received negative reviews and closed after two months; still, Mr. Grier, 25, was nominated for a Tony Award for featured actor and hailed as "a promising star" by Frank Rich in his New York Times review. Mr. Grier would receive a second Tony nomination in 2010 in David Mamet's "Race," playing a black lawyer. While Mr. Grier returned to theater over the years, it was "In Living Color" that became his calling card. Mr. Grier, who cited Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson as touchstones, met Damon Wayans and Keenen Ivory Wayans through actor friends in the 1980s, and they recruited him for the television series, where he became famous playing the effeminate film critic Antoine Merriweather and the artistically challenged blues musician Calhoun Tubbs. Those characters alone make him a star among his "Porgy" cast mates. "David's sense of humor and comic timing were incredibly influential on me and a lot of African-American men," said Joshua Henry, who plays Jake, a fisherman, in "Porgy." Mr. Grier was a one-man morale booster in August after the composer Stephen Sondheim publicly criticized artistic inventions being discussed for this "Porgy and Bess." "The mood was a little down then, but David could pick up a funeral," Mr. Henry said, recalling Mr. Grier's brassy enthusiasm whenever the director Diane Paulus asked him to try something new. Two cast favorites: "Flying in, Diane!" and, underscoring his confidence that he would nail his part by showtime, "On the day, Diane!" Ms. Paulus said she was sold on Mr. Grier at his audition performance, which she described as a blend of rigorous technique, quick-witted improvisation and powerful bari-tenor. That combination was on display last week as well as he rehearsed one of Sporting Life's numbers - "It Ain't Necessarily So" - for Jimmy Fallon's late-night show, an invitation that reflected Mr. Grier's ability and his draw as a brand-name comic. Mr. Grier, who received mostly glowing reviews for "Porgy and Bess," said he was forgoing stand-up gigs in New York for now to protect his voice for months of performances ahead. His early fears about singing the music have fallen away. He said he wanted to be in particularly fine shape when his 87-year-old father feels well enough to travel to see the show. It was only last year, in a conversation with his brother, that Mr. Grier said he remembered another family connection to the musical: His father had contracted polio in the 1950s and afterward walked with crutches or a cane and brace, as Porgy does. "I'd never realized it before, but my father saw himself a little in that character," Mr. Grier said. When I was a kid, I wanted to walk with my dad's limp - my dad was my hero - but that infuriated him, and he would make me walk back and forth in the living room until I walked without it. I never knew just how personal this show was for us until I found myself in it.