Betty Buckley sees her career as a journey of the soul

By: Michael Grossberg
The Columbus Dispatch
September 14, 2000

Betty Buckley doesn't consider herself an entertainer.

"It's not my job," the singer-actress said recently from New York.

"It is my job to take people on a journey, sometimes into deeper regions of their souls and out the other side. If possible, I want to enlist everyone to joy and inspiration."

Buckley's journey has taken her from a childhood of dancing and singing to a popular 1970s TV series (Eight Is Enough), hit films (Carrie, Tender Mercies), an international concert and recording career, Broadway blockbusters (most notably, Cats and Sunset Boulevard) and the occasional Broadway flop (Carrie).

"(Show-business) careers are cyclical. It's always been like that. That's one of the things I learned in my 20s. One day you're praised and given awards, and the next day people don't want to hear from you. That's part of the trip."

Her concert Friday will mark her first trip to Columbus.

Her most recent compact disc, released in February, is Heart to Heart, a duet with pianist Kenny Werner. Buckley has worked for 11 years with Werner and bass player Tony Marino, who will perform with her at the Southern Theatre. Rounding out the concert team is percussionist Duduka da Fonseca, who has accompanied Buckley for several years.

"My relationship with my musicians is one of the most meaningful in my life," she said. "The work I do with them means so much more than just the pure pleasure of it. Music is the communication of my soul."

Their recent two-week concert run at London's Donmar Warehouse has been recorded for Concord Records for release in February.

Meanwhile, Buckley's production company, KO Records, has rereleased her first album, Betty Buckley, based on a live concert she gave at New York's St. Mark's Church immediately after her run in Cats.

Buckley won a 1983 Tony award for originating the Broadway role of Grizabella, Cats' aging glamourpuss. Her vibrant rendition of Memory -- now one of her concert signature pieces -- helped propel that song to the top of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's songbook.

Grizabella ranks with Dixie Scott (Tender Mercies) and Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) among Buckley's favorite roles.

"Grizabella is one of my teachers and soul companions," she said.

"She had reached a point where she'd been through everything -- the highs and the lows -- and she had a sense of what was significant: expressing her own heart and her appreciation for life."

Interestingly, Buckley said that when she emphasized the role's pathos and "tremendous need," she was unremarkable onstage. Yet, when she "reached out to share her heart with this phenomenal love," Grizabella "stopped the show."

"She taught me how to work. It took a lot for me to learn how to play her, and now she reveals very beautiful things about life to me."

Buckley also learned a lot from working with director Bruce Beresford, writer Horton Foote and co-star Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies. The Oscar-winning 1983 film gave Buckley her favorite film role: Dixie Scott, the alcoholic, "emotionally crippled" country-western star.

"I went to acting school to learn to play great roles like that, that take you to the dark recesses of the human soul."

Buckley would not find another role as juicy for more than a decade.

Then she played Norma Desmond, the cloistered silent-film star in Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, to acclaim in London. She replaced Glenn Close in the Broadway production, which won the 1995 Tony for best musical.

"Norma Desmond was an opportunity to use everything I knew onstage -- but push it even further."

"After all those years performing, I felt like a little racehorse. They would take me out, and say 'God, she's fast,' but they had never let me really race."

Buckley, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, left the starting gate at the age of 2, when she began singing at church.

At 11, she saw her first musical (The Pajama Game) at Fort Worth's Casa Manana. The "coolest thing I'd ever seen" was the re-creation of Bob Fosse's choreography for Steam Heat.

"It was an extraordinary moment -- I felt a consciousness move up through the top of my head -- and I realized that that's what I'd be doing for the rest of my life."

When the New York-based dancers who had replicated Fosse's choreography for the production settled in Fort Worth and opened a dance school, Buckley became one of their most eager students.

By 15, she had learned enough to make her Casa Manana stage debut as Dainty June in Gypsy. Many other Casa Manana musicals followed, and they prepared Buckley for a performing arts career. After college, she moved to New York in January 1969. On her first day in town, she won her first Broadway role: as Thomas Jefferson's wife in 1776, which went on to win the 1969 Tony for best musical.

Other Broadway roles followed in Fosse's Pippin; Lloyd Webber's Song and Dance; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the 1986 Tony winner for best musical; and The Triumph of Love, which earned Buckley her second Tony nomination in 1997.

Yet, with roles in great stage musicals increasingly hard to find, Buckley has concentrated in recent years on her music career. She also teaches scene-study and song-interpretation classes in New York and recently filmed a small, recurring role in Oz, HBO's acclaimed prison series. Buckley will begin appearing in January episodes as a prisoner's mother.

"I love the musical theater, and I get sent projects a lot, but I pass on them a lot. It's hard to find a good musical. At this point, I wouldn't go back to Broadway unless it was something I'm madly in love with."