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ONSTAGE & BACKSTAGE: Brava, Betty Buckley
By Seth Rudetsky
14 Jul 2008
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Betty Buckley
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A week in the life of actor, musician and Chatterbox host Seth Rudetsky.
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Hello from the flight from Dallas — where I worked with Betty Buckley on three hit concert dates at Lyric Stage — to New York. The "good" news is, I'm in a middle seat. James is across the aisle from me sitting with his sister Danielle and Juli. Danielle's flying up to New York because she's coming on the Rosie cruise for the first time. It's been very weird for me, being in Texas the week before the cruise. Usually, this week is filled with non-stop rehearsals getting ready for the cruise. The rehearsals are still happening, but I'm not there like I usually am, supervising/getting in everyone's way.
Let me start at the beginning of last week. One of the things I forgot to mention about seeing [title of show] last Saturday night is that I stopped by the merchandising table on the way out. They have so much fun stuff…mugs and t-shirts, etc. The woman running the booth told me that the maximum she's ever sold in one night has been $500, but on the first preview of [title of show] she sold $3,000! And then I spied that they were selling my first book, "The Q Guide to Broadway." I smiled humbly, held up the stack of books and magnanimously asked her if I should autograph them. I then got the amazing ego-boosting response I got in that San Francisco bookstore: A shrug and a "If you want…" Wow and ouch.
Anyhoo. (PS, I got a hostile email from a reader asking me to stop writing "anyhoo." Hmm...how about you stop writing hostile emails?) James and I flew into Dallas last Sunday (after our amazing three-and-a-half hours of sleep) and we spent his birthday afternoon with his daughter, mom and sister at the Aquarium. Then we drove to Betty's ranch in Ft. Worth. Betty's assistant Cathy let us use her house the whole time we were there and cooked all of our meals for us. In exchange, I broke her garbage disposal. How was I supposed to know you're not supposed to throw cherry pits and egg shells into a disposal? One night Betty and Cathy went to see a concert in Ft. Worth, so James and I went out to dinner at a real small-town Texas Mesquite-grill restaurant. James said that maybe someone there would recognize me from the Legally Blonde reality show, and I bet him that no one would. Cut to, he asked the waitress if she watched the Legally Blonde reality show on MTV, and she enthusiastically said she did. He smiled triumphantly. So he was was right! Then James pointed to me and said to the waitress, "Look, it's Seth!" Silence. Then I said, "Remember? I'm the vocal coach." Staring. "Um…I play the piano and teach the girls the music every week."
Blinking. No recognition. So, I guess we were both right. Yay?
Betty and I had three days to put together her all-Broadway request show at Lyric Stage. For years, her fans and producers from concert venues have been asking for an all-Broadway show, but she's always included jazz as a large part of the show. She admitted that she sometimes has a contrary nature and attributed it to growing up with her mother wanting her to be Julie Andrews, yet she was wanting to be Janis Joplin. Regardless, she finally decided to give the people what they want and put together a show with songs and stories from her many years on Broadway. Betty and I spent hours each day in her music room going through songs and picking arrangements. Every time we'd get into an argument about how a song should go, Betty would laugh and say she wanted us to do that during the show. The biggest disagreement we had was which version of "Memory" to do. She wanted to do her re-arrangement of the song, which she calls "Space Memory" and begins with a few weird, mysterious chords. I wanted it Broadway-style and demanded we begin with the signature "Memory" vamp that we all know from the cast album. Finally, we agreed to compromise: I put some "Betty chords" in the middle, but got to begin it with the vamp I grew up on (Dum dum dum, dum dum). When Betty first heard it, she was in shock. It had been so long since she sang it with that intro. After we went through all of her songs, we worked with the director, Richard Jay-Alexander, but did it on the phone because he's in pre-production for the Hollywood Bowl Les Miz concert. He said that the audience should be allowed to make requests and write down questions for her and also came up with the idea of me starting the second act of the show with some of my signature deconstructions. Yay! Continued...
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