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| DIRECTORY |
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Provincetown :: Friday, March 12th 2010
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A Star Is Born
Betty Buckley - A Journey to P’town via Tennessee
By Rebecca M. Alvin of Provincetown Magazine
September 17th, 2009
At 13, Betty Buckley had a vision. “At certain moments in my life I had these visions of what would take place, and then this very passionate inner instruction about what I needed to do to prepare to become that kind of singer, that kind of communicator, storyteller.”
| “I definitely think of myself as a singer of God... in that I’m an instrument of a higher consciousness that resides in all people and in the hearts of all people, and it’s my job to sing and express that energy.” |
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At 21, she made her Broadway debut in 1776; at 36, she accepted the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance in Cats as Grizabella – a role she still considers one of her top two roles (The other being Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard).
“When they brought the recording of Memory into my dressing room at the Winter Garden [Theatre] for me to hear the final version, I flashed on that 13-year-old vision, standing on the balcony in my house on the west side of Fort Worth looking out at the West Texas plain... I kind of knew what kind of singer I would become eventually. And then I heard that recording when I was 35. So it took from age 13 to 35, but then there it was,” she recalls with wonder.
Buckley will be arriving in Provincetown next week as the headlining performer in the 4th Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, replacing Dixie Carter, who had to drop out due to unforeseen complications from a surgery earlier in the year. She will perform in Ghosts From a Summer Hotel, a concert version of Tennessee Williams’ last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, on Friday, September 25th, and she will also perform in concert at the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St.) with her longtime collaborator, Kenny Werner on Sunday, September 27th.
Buckley is pleased to fill in, especially since she is a great admirer of Williams.
“His language is very poetic and I love the kind of surrealistic images; they’re very haunting images, she explains. “Even though his writing definitely comes from very specific experiences of his own life, they really transcend that into a more universal, kind of archetypical experience for the reader. Even though he was a gay man and very definitely talking about issues of frustration and kind of being the outsider culturally, there’s a resonance,” she says.
But Buckley is not only a fan; she also had the opportunity to audition for Mr. Williams some years back. In fact, she was offered the role of standby for Claire Bloom in The Red Devil Battery Sign, but because at that point she’d already starred on Broadway, her agent didn’t allow her to accept a standby role, even if it was in a Williams play.
Since then, she has played Marguerite Gautier in his Camino Real at Hartford Stage, and she says she hopes to some day direct one of his plays – Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke were mentioned as particularly interesting in this regard.
Specifically, Buckley says she feels connected to his writing through the women in his plays.
“His female characters are very beautiful and powerful and smart and expressive beings that are in repressed circumstances, and I think I really relate to that... because I feel about them a strong humanist, feminist perspective.”
Looking back on her Fort Worth, TX, childhood, Buckley, the eldest child in the family, sees herself as “the hero kid but also the scapegoat in the family.” Imbued with talent from an early age, she found herself at the center of her parents’ conflicts with one another.
On the one hand, there was her mother, who believed in her talent and encouraged her to follow her passion. But her father, a former World War II Air Force bombardier, found the prospect of his daughter pursuing a show business career distasteful, to say the least.
Ultimately, Buckley took off for New York, where she got the lead in 1776 on her first day there. The show would be her Broadway debut, one of the most exciting moments of the young performer’s life at that time, but one that would go on without her father’s approval or his attendance.
With nine hit Broadways shows, 11 albums, and roles in films directed by major directors like Woody Allen (Another Woman), M. Night Shyamalan (The Happening), Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies), Brian DePalma (Carrie), and Roman Polanski (Frantic), and of course, her memorable performance as Abby on TV’s Eight is Enough (1977-1981), among other things, Buckley seems the personification of success.
Like many divas with gorgeous voices, Buckley began singing in church choirs and she carries that experience with her.
“I definitely think of myself as a singer of God... in that I’m an instrument of a higher consciousness that resides in all people and in the hearts of all people, and it’s my job to sing and express that energy.”
Her collaborator/arranger/music director, Kenny Werner, with whom she has worked for 20 years, likewise sees his talent coming from a higher consciousness, according to Buckley.
“We’re just kind of soul mates in music,” she explains. “ He’s been enormously generous with his great talent and gifts to facilitate the music that I hear inside myself to really come into the world. It’s a very creative relationship. We kind of paint with music... In fact, when I first met him, I [didn’t] have that same vocabulary he has, but I would bring out books by great painters and say ‘okay, this song I think should sound like this painting’... We were very inspired by the Impressionist painters... and we both have very deep feelings about music.”
Although Buckley’s teenaged vision of herself did ultimately come to fruition, the star of stage and screen didn’t get to fame and fortune without struggle. Talent is often only half the battle in launching a performing arts career, and in that regard, Buckley is no different. Her complicated relationship with her father has been a key struggle in her life and getting past that, giving herself “permission” to do what she loves has been a lifelong challenge.
“My father was a very difficult guy and had enormous emotional problems and was very, very strict and harsh, and he didn’t want me to be a performer,” she recalls, still affected by the memory.
“He was a very sensitive, artistic young man who’d been sent off to war as a bombardier in World War II, and I don’t think he ever recovered from that,” she posits. “And I didn’t know the effect the war had had on him until one of his buddies came back stage to Cats [and told me about his experiences]... He was basically hell-bent on getting back to Texas and getting married, and he’d said he was going to raise the perfect family, you know, to kind of compensate for this crazy world he’d grown up in. So I think he just was really living at all extremes because of a deeper pain.”
Buckley credits the intervention of other people who believed in her talent, such as the agent who signed her in college, with really allowing her to blossom as a performer, go to New York, and have the career she was meant to have.
Although Buckley has struggled with this part of her life, in some ways perhaps it is these struggles that have enabled her to connect with the parts she’s played, to sing the way she sings, to connect with Williams the way she has.
She also got something pretty important in showbiz from her dad’s rough personality.
“There’s a lot of male authority figures in show business that I’m not intimidated by, having grown up with my father,” she says laughing. “I don’t take no for an answer very easily. And you know, when they’re weird, I’m just like, ‘you think that’s tough, I grew up with my dad. You’re nothing compared to that’.”
Betty Buckley will be appearing in two programs next week. She will perform “Ghosts From a Summer Hotel” at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 25th. Tickets ($35) and information are available online at www.twptown.org, by calling 866.789.TENN, or in person at the Crown & Anchor Box Office between Sept. 24th & 27th. In addition, on Sunday, September 27th, she will perform a concert with Kenny Werner at 8 p.m. Tickets are $65 (VIP)/$45 (general)/$25 (standing room) available at www.onlyatthecrown.com or at the Crown & Anchor Box Office. Both programs will be performed at the Paramount at the Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown (508.487.1430).
Also visit ProvincetownMagazine.net for more articles and information.
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