Betty Buckley’s first public performance ought to have been a memorable occasion. It was, after all, preamble to a life of singing and acting on stage and screen that has earned her accolades as “the voice of Broadway,” a Tony award, gigs at top Gotham spots like the Café Carlyle and The Blue Note, and fans that are legion.
“When I was 2, my Mom had me sing in church,” said Ms. Buckley. Unfortunately, she has no memory of the occasion.
With her big, powerful voice reduced to thin cell-phone timbre, Ms. Buckley was speaking recently while en route to San Diego, where she was booked for a concert the following evening. The next day, her schedule had her taking off for Australia to wind up filming on an HBO miniseries, “The Pacific,” in which she has “a nice cameo role.”
She will, however, be back in the U.S. for the big Memorial Day weekend which—happily for her East End fans—she intends to spend in the Hamptons. She and her longtime arranger-accompanist, jazz musician Kenny Werner, will give three performances at Bay Street Theatre over the weekend, taking the stage each evening at 8 p.m. for what the theater is billing as “an extraordinary, intimate evening” of show tunes, standards and more.
Ms. Buckley’s memory of those first baby steps toward stardom may be shaky, but the story of her rise is well documented. That church congregation that first heard the little girl with the huge voice was in Fort Worth, Texas, where she was raised. At 3, she began dance lessons there with her aunt, a former dancer for Billy Rose. Talent show triumphs and stage acclaim followed her to Texas Christian University and led to runner-up status in the Miss Texas competition and a 1968 Asian tour with Miss America, visiting the wounded from the Vietnam War.
That experience almost turned her away from the theater to become a journalist instead, but the voice and the talent would not be denied. At the age of 21, she succumbed, moved to New York and immediately landed her first job in the Broadway musical “1776.”
After that there was no turning back.
And why would she? The parts kept coming and they kept getting better. She was studying voice with “an incredible teacher” and feeling more and more at home in the city.
It was Ms. Buckley’s rendition of the song, “Memory,” in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” that firmly established her reputation. Her Tony Award for outstanding achievement in the theater in 1982 recognized her performance in the role of Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, who stopped hearts from the moment she began singing, “Midnight, not a sound from the pavement…”
For a year and a half Ms. Buckley dazzled audiences as Grizabella, giving them goose bumps with her singing but not, she insists, with her dancing.
Yes, she conceded, she had studied dancing “as a kid.” But, she added, “I was not one of the best dancers in ‘Cats,’ I can tell you that.”
Asked how an actor keeps a role fresh for a year and a half, she replied that she is “a meditator.”
“It becomes a kind of ritual,” she said. “You’re doing the same thing but your experience is always different.”
Despite the roots she put down in Manhattan, Ms. Buckley is once again living in Texas where she has a ranch, two show horses, cats and a parrot. The show horses are cutting horses and cutting is a sport for which Ms. Buckley has nourished a passion almost equal to her love for performing onstage.
“I’ve been in love with cutting since I was 12,” she said. A sport with roots in the Old West, cutting requires horse and rider to separate a calf away from a cattle herd and keep it from rejoining the herd for a short period of time.
“You aren’t allowed to cue the horse except with your feet and body weight,” Ms. Buckley explained.
As for so many other New Yorkers, 9/11 was a life-changing event for Ms. Buckley, whose Texas ranch began to beckon in the catastrophe’s aftermath.
“After 9/11, I started training with a top trainer,” she said. After a year of honing her cutting skills, “I decided I had to live in Texas with my horses and I sold my New York apartment,” she said.
The most recent of Ms. Buckley’s 11 CDs, “Quintessence” is just out (she will be signing copies at East End Books on Saturday, May 24, from 2 to 3:30 p.m.) and next month the M. Night Shyamalan thriller, “The Happening,” in which she has a starring role, will be released. Her busy schedule would seem to leave little time for her horses, but when her two passions compete there are apparently no losers. It’s all fun, she insists, and she is especially pleased to be revisiting the Hamptons.
“I’ve appeared in the Hamptons before,” she said, “and it will be great to come back and perform.”
Tickets for Betty Buckley’s performances at $60 per person can be reserved by calling the Bay Street box office at 631-725-9500 or logging on to www.baystreet.org. A limited number of tickets entitling holders to the performance and a private post-performance party with Betty Buckley on Saturday, May 24, are available for $100. Reservations for those tickets are being taken at the theater’s development office, 631-725-0818, extension 106.
on May 19, 2008