Sunset Boulevard: Articles & Reviews
Betty's Back
By Paul Wontorek
Theater Week
July 17, 1995
It's approaching midnight on a Friday and Betty Buckley is giddily launching into a story about a bad girl from Texas named Choncho. Considering the week that she's had, it's amazing that she's still so kicky at this time of night. Readying herself for those stairs by training for two hours a day. Working out the vocal chords that she rested for six weeks after her successful London run. Finding her way around a new theater and a new cast. Recording a mini album of Norma's songs, an almost unheard of luxury for a replacement lead. Listening to interviewer after interviewer trying to find a place for her in the nasty media circus that is Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's million-dollar ubermusical.
None of this seems to phase Buckley, who conquered the biggest role of her already big career last Tuesday, one day after her 48th birthday. She looks great -- extremely well-rested and definitely in good spirits. She's telling the Choncho story. We're back in Texas, when Buckley was a small-for-her-age I l-year-old aspiring rodeo rider named Betty Lynn. Despite her size, Betty Lynn (along with her best friend Dana) was a leader among the younger children in the neighborhood, especially her three kid brothers. She was the girl who would always be making up new games for all of the kids to play. But when they were playing bicycle relay or something, she would hate the fact that she would lead one team and Dana would lead the other. She wanted to be on the same team as Dana. This is where Choncho fits in. Betty Lynn made up this bad girl and told all of the other children that they were racing against Choncho's team. Everyone worked twice as hard, thinking that Choncho was over their shoulder, ready to claim victory.
"They would race really really hard against this imaginary team," she says, in a fit of laughter that's intoxicating. "Years later, we all laughed and laughed and I kept saying, 'Why did you believe me?' and they said, 'Because you told the story well.' "
Although many adore Buckley's Herculean voice, she considers her finest asset to be her storytelling abilities. Certainly, she's been telling some of Broadway's most interesting stories since her 1968 debut. And as she gets older, the stories being offered to her are getting better. She won a Tony for the story of a faded glamour feline named Grizabella. She won notoriety for the creepy story of Margaret White, mother of telekinetic teen Carrie. In the flourishing recording career that she's found since the demise of Carrie on Broadway, she leans towards songs from the stage (like Stephen Schwartz's "Meadowlark") and the pop world (Amanda McBroom's "Dreaming") that have a good story to tell. And now Broadway finally gets to see her brilliant take on the bizarre story of Norma Desmond, after a London engagement that warranted, arguably, the best reviews of any of the Normas.
You don't have to feel the desperation to make it now," Buckley likes to tell her young acting students in the classes she teaches at Terry Schreiber Studios. "You can give yourself the time to grow into yourself. This is about a long-term journey. It isn't about what our culture tells us to believe: that if we don't make it in our 20s, then forget about it. That's a crock."
Buckley has been teaching since she was 24 years old, whenever she's been between shows. Sometimes, she even fits teaching into her performance schedule. She did that during the runs of Cats and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She's not sure yet if she'll be able to take on classes during her time as Norma. "We'll have to wait and see how I feel," she says.
Most of the students in her classes probably first looked up to Buckley when she played Abby, the role that brought her national attention. Her take on the super stepmom on Eight is Enough was enough to erase any damage that Disney cartoons may have done to the image of stepmothers. She was the perfect embodiment of motherhood in the '70s -- somewhere between yesterday's Donna Reed and today's Roseanne. Buckley insists that it was her own input that kept the character from being more like the former. "They tried to lock me in the kitchen and put me in muumuus," she remembers, "and I was like 'No way, Jose.' In the beginning, it was a real struggle to make her hip. They wanted me to be like something from the '50s and I was like, 'Have you been out in Middle America, guys?' "
Her four seasons on the show turned out to be so memorable that Buckley still gets recognized as her alter ego. "Strangely enough," she says, "often it's because of the sound of my voice. I'll be at a department store buying makeup or something and someone will hear me talking to the clerk and say, 'Are you Abby on Eight is Enough?' Hopefully some of those people will come see me in Sunset," she says matter-of-factly. Then she catches herself. "Wait. They know me as Abby and they come to see me as Norma? That'd be like a shock to their system." She starts laughing. "Oh, my God!" she says, imitating an Abby fan, "my favorite stepmom Abby is capable of being a dark and scary character!" She shakes her head. "That might really mess up their minds in terms of their concept of Mom," she says. "Oh, no! Tell them not to come. I don't want to be responsible for that psychological damage."
But Abby's following is nothing compared to that of Norma Desmond. Buckley had never even seen Billy Wilder's masterpiece until the night before she flew to her London audition. And apparently she didn't realize how many other people in the world had seen the film -- let along those who memorized it. After she got the part, reality hit in a cab on the way to the theater. The driver said to her, "You're the new Norma Desmond, aren't you?" After she nodded "Yes," he broke out into some Norma lines for her. "Oh my God," Buckley thought, "everybody does Norma Desmond." Patti LuPone, who Buckley replaced in the London company, told her to ask their mutual dresser, Murray Lane, to do Norma. "He's the best Norma Desmond of them all," Buckley says, generously excluding herself from the equation.
In a good example of the media flurry surrounding Sunset Boulevard in its early days, Buckley was mentioned to play Norma years before she actually did. In fact, when the project was first publicized as Lloyd Webber's next piece, her friends began calling her. "For a year before it ever even went into production, it was a big constant in my life," she says. "People said, 'Have you heard from them?' When they called Patti to do the workshop, I told people, 'Don't call me about this anymore. This is obviously not my show.' " It was a couple of years later that it started again, once the unfortunate news of LuPone's dismissal from the New York company became public. A replacement was needed in London. The calls started again. "My brother was on the Internet getting all of the gossip," she says, "calling me constantly with everything. He'd be like, 'The word is they sent you the score and you're learning it.' I said, 'Nobody's called. I know nothing about anything.' " Buckley even says that she dreamt about not getting the show. "It was a very nice dream. I felt very okay with it all and I just let go of it," she says. Then the call came.
Buckley had been finishing up her follow-up album to 1993's Children Will Listen on Sterling Records when she got the London gig. Suddenly, she had the chance to record Norma's two powerhouse ballads, "With One Look" and "As If We Never Said Goodbye," before she left. The timing was perfect. The album came out just after her rave reviews from London crossed the Atlantic, making its release big news in New York. But the Sunset songs on the album, which was eventually titled "With One Look," are very different from what is heard at the Minskoff. Kenny Werner, Buckley's musical director and arranger of four years, turned the songs into what Buckley called "tender and darkly sweet interpretations" in the liner notes. They are the kind of unique arrangements that have made Buckley's albums stand out from those of her Broadway contemporaries. Don't call it easy listening. Don't call it jazz. Don't call it show tunes. "It is what it is," says Buckley simply.
Buckley had been courted throughout her career with record deals. Back when she was doing Promises, Promises in London, they wanted her to be a white Shirley Bassey, but she preferred Joni Mitchell. When she got back to New York, when tribal love rock musicals were all the rage, she wanted to be Janis Joplin, while her mother was hoping for something more along the lines of Julie Andrews. While she was in Cats, she was approached once again, but backed out after having trouble deciding what type of music to do. When the film Tender Mercies came out, she talked to a big country music manager about going that route. But none of the offers allowed Buckley to do the kind of music that she really wanted to do: everything, from Manilow to Mitchell to Mancini.
While she was performing at Rainbow & Stars, she needed a new accompanist and found Werner, who was recommended by David Sanborn. "We had an immediate marriage of approach," she says of their initial meeting. "One of my dreams in terms of the evolution of musical theater is that people would arrange more contemporary sounding scores, which I guess is just my taste. Suddenly I had access to this musician in Kenny who could help me interpret the music I like. He knew nothing about musical theater. Everyone told me to stay within that repertoire because that's how people identify me. But I wanted to show them it could be done with a different sound, a different arrangement. Rather than just presenting the songs as everyone is used to hearing them."
Once Buckley and Werner had developed a sizeable set, they took their work to the stages of the Bottom Line, one of Greenwich Village's more respected rock nightclubs. "It's my favorite place to work in New York," she says, "because it has that whole rock singer cache. When I got called by the Bottom Line, it was like 'Yes!' I got to finally fulfill my dream of being a hip musician. It's loose and casual. Rainbow & Stars was too uptight for me. A traditional cabaret act is not what interests me." Record executives invited to see the Bottom Line engagements were puzzled by what they were doing, unable to put a name on it. Finally Mort Drosnes, a producer about to start his own label called Sterling, made them an offer. "He said, 'I'll give you this much money. Make a record.' He'd seen us a lot at the Bottom Line," Buckley says. He asked for an album of theater songs to start with, but gave her a five-album contract.
Now Buckley's third album with Drosnes and Sterling has just been released, a live album recording of a concert that she performed with the 65 piece BBC Radio Orchestra in London last March. In addition to signature songs like "Meadowlark" and "Memory," Buckley sings Weill ("Pirate Jenny," "Surabaya Johnny"), Sondheim ("Finishing the Hat," "Marry Me a Little"), and big bubbly show tunes like "Rose's Turn." Buckley is clearly hesitant about joining the permanent place in gossip columns that seems to be a fringe benefit of her new job. It's already happened. A gossip item that came out after she was announced as Glenn Close's replacement said that it wasn't definite, meaning that she could possibly go through what LuPone and Faye Dunaway did. "So much of that stuff has been the nature of the media on the show," she says. "It's a mean circus kind of atmosphere that sells tickets. That's fine, but that's not the reality."
The diva bickerings are simply untrue, she insists. "The reality is that when you get called to do a job, you're glad. You do it. I didn't compete with Patti. She didn't compete with me. I don't compete with Glenn Close. She doesn't compete with me. When it was Patti's show, it was Patti's show. When it was Glenn's show, it was Glenn's. When it's my show, it's my show. That's the truth of it."
Which brings us back to Choncho. "It's the same thing," she says. "The mythological competition. There is no competition. But we can all pretend that there's a Choncho out there and we all have to be really pert!" She laughs in a big way, Texas-style. The story has been told.