Betty Buckley picks up the phone at her Texas ranch with a dog to settle first. "Come on, lie down," she says. "You have to lie down, buddy." The buddy is Lucas. Once he's sorted, she's ready to talk about the weather, which in Texas has been relentlessly hot all summer, then cooler, then hot again, then pouring rain. Today, she says, is beautiful. "I went on a walk with my dog and it was bright blue sky and really crisp air and wind."
That's how it starts: warm, entirely unguarded. What follows is a long conversation with one of the most celebrated voices in the history of the American musical, the woman who won a Tony for Cats, who gave Broadway a Norma Desmond nobody else would have dared, who has taught other performers for nearly half a century, and who still, at 79, remembers exactly what it felt like to open her mouth and watch a room full of adults jump backwards.
Back in Vegas
Buckley's last Las Vegas appearance was in 2019, as Dolly Levi in the first national tour of the most recent Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, a year on the road she remembers fondly. "It was fun traveling to all these different cities," she says.
She knows Myron's at The Smith Center well, having played a couple of previous engagements there, and she's fond of the room. "It's nice, it's intimate, but it's still got a sense of space to it," she says. "I always enjoy rooms with nice acoustics." The building's art deco nods to Hoover Dam, the architect's inspiration, delighted her when she heard about them. She'll see them for herself this time.
Two shows in one day, at 3 pm and 7 pm on Saturday, October 24, would daunt plenty of performers. Buckley takes it in stride. For the past several years she has held an annual residency at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in New York, building a brand-new collection of songs every April and performing it three nights running, two shows a night, right after five days of teaching and performing at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she's in residence. By comparison, a single double-header in Las Vegas is "not that hard."
At the piano, as at Joe's Pub, will be Christian Jacob, her music director and arranger of nearly 20 years. "He's such a great pianist, and brilliant arranger and music director," she says. "I'm really blessed to get to work with him."
The partnership began with Buckley as a fan. She'd been listening to Jacob on the records of the Tierney Sutton Band, of which he was a founding member, and fell for "his touch on the piano and the chords — his palette, the musical colors he played with." She was nearing the end of a 20-year collaboration with another pianist she calls a genius, Kenny Werner, and could see it coming. So she got Jacob's number from the Los Angeles musicians' union and called him herself.
"I said, 'Mr. Jacob, it's Betty Buckley calling. I'm a singer. Do you work with other girl singers besides Tierney?' He goes, 'Oh yeah.' And I said, 'OK, I'd like to hire you.'" He subbed when Werner wasn't available, and when that chapter closed, she asked him to take over. They've worked together ever since.
Enough
The concerts draw on Buckley's new album, Enough, recorded live at her 2025 Joe's Pub show and released this summer. She's hoping for Grammy consideration and makes no secret of it. "It's a beautiful album," she says.
The title track found her the way so much finds us now: late at night, on YouTube. Channel-surfing, she came across Sara Bareilles, "one of my favorite songwriters, lyricists, composers," performing a new song called Enough with a symphony orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.
"I was completely taken by the song and her performance," she says. "And I wrote her an email." The song is from The Interestings, Bareilles' new musical, due in 2027, and it had never been released as a recording. Bareilles gave her permission to sing and record it. "It's just a stunningly beautiful song."
Buckley has long said that songs find us when we need them most, and on this album, she says, every one of them did. A second Bareilles song, You Matter to Me from Waitress, sits alongside 1960s songs by James Taylor, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, all in fresh arrangements by Jacob. Together they make something of a statement for the moment.
"I think the tone, if you listen to the album, addresses some of the cultural things that we're going through and have been for the past several years," she says, "in a hopefully healing way."
The reason it's a live album, rather than a studio one, is refreshingly unromantic: "Because my record company paid for the live album." And twenty albums in, the recording process is still teaching her one thing. "How to sing better."
Little Betty Buckley with the giant voice
Buckley tells her own story as a chain of teachers and mentors, people who saw something in her and opened a door. The chain begins at home.
"She'd been a singer and dancer when she was a young woman," Buckley says of her mother, "and then my father married her. She was known as the Jitterbug Queen of Texas Tech University. She had really wild red curly hair and was quite beautiful and a wonderful dancer."
Buckley sang in church at three or four, then in the Methodist junior choir, then the all-city choir in elementary school. She studied dance from about age three with her aunt, a professional dancer at the original Casa Mañana who had once "escaped Texas to go dance in Hollywood movies." Buckley's mother, then a teenager, was sent to Los Angeles to bring her back.
When Buckley was 11, her mother took her to her first musical, a production of The Pajama Game at Casa Mañana, Fort Worth's regional theater. The number was Steam Heat, in the classic Bob Fosse style: derby hats, black suits, bow ties, little black dance shoes.
"I was just like, oh my God, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen," she says. "I had what I now understand as an epiphany. I felt this energy rise up to the top of my head and kind of point my attention, look back at me and say, this is it. This is what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. And I was like, OK, I'm in for that."
"Sing it as loud as you can"
In seventh grade, her junior high announced a talent show. Buckley was tiny — she didn't grow until she was 16, and for a while she fantasized about becoming the first girl jockey — and the other acts were mostly girls doing line dances. She went home and told her mother she wanted to learn Steam Heat.
Her mother had just read in the paper that Ed Holloman and Larry Howard, who had danced for Fosse for years, had come off the road and opened a dance school in Fort Worth, Holloman's hometown. She called them, and they brought Betty in for a private session.
"They said, 'Can you dance?' I said, 'Yes.' And they said, 'Can you sing?' And I said, 'Yes.' And they said, 'Well, sing this.'" She sang it. "And they said, 'No, no, no, sing it as loud as you can.'"
That was new. In the junior choir and the all-city choir, she'd always been put in the back row. Her choir teacher — platinum hair, red lipstick, mules that click-clacked when she walked — was forever telling her, "Betty Lynn, blend in, blend in."
"I was trying really hard to blend in, and I didn't know why I didn't blend in, but I didn't," she says. "So it was the first time in my life somebody said, sing it as loud as you can. And I was like, yeah, man. And I just opened up and sang it really loud, and they all jumped backwards."
Holloman and Howard taught her the original Fosse choreography, hat tricks and all. Her mother had a little suit made, with a bow tie and a derby. She auditioned, made the show at Monnig Junior High, and was given the 11 o'clock spot — the number right before the finale, which in this case was the senior girls' cancan line.
"That's really kind of been my specialty in theater," she says. "It's the number that brings the whole evening together, before the finale of the show."
When she finished, there was a moment of breathless silence. "I'll never forget it. And then everybody went insane in the auditorium." She took a bow and ran off. The principal, Mr. Bostwick, sent her back out for a second one, and for years afterward, whenever she ran into him, he'd remind her of it.
Against her father's wishes
Not everyone at home was thrilled. Her father, a strict Air Force lieutenant colonel, didn't want her to be a performer. "He was really upset about it," she says. "So my mother had to sneak me out of the house for my dance lessons with Ed Holloman and Larry Howard, and they became my mentors. They taught me everything about performance and Bob Fosse and all that stuff."
She taught herself to sing from her mother's records. "My mother had tons of cast albums. I listened to them all, and she also had a collection of the great lady singers. I studied all of them. I would mimic their recordings, and that's really how I taught myself to sing."
The voice changed how the world saw her. "I was shy, and I'd been kind of tormented before this," she says. "And then after that, I was kind of notorious, because I was little bitty Betty Buckley with this giant voice."
Her mother entered her in talent shows, which Buckley never quite understood ("How does a little girl singer-dancer compare to a bad ballerina from Nacogdoches and a boy oboe player?"), and beauty pageants, which she understood even less. "I was a budding young feminist," she says. By college she was a charter subscriber to Ms. magazine.
Auditions, though, she loved. "People would dismiss me because of how small I was," she says. "And then my mama would put the tape on and I'd start singing, and literally, table after table of these judges would jump backwards when they heard me sing. And I'd be like, yes. That was kind of my super weapon when I was a kid."
Casa Mañana, Six Flags and a journalism degree
At 15, Buckley made her musical theater debut at Casa Mañana, playing June in Gypsy, and danced that same summer in West Side Story as Baby John's girl. After that it was a show there every summer: Ado Annie, Susan in The Desert Song, Your Own Thing, "tons of shows."
She also put in serious stage hours at Six Flags Over Texas. At 16 she sang in the campus revue, two or three shows a night with an orchestra. At 17 she worked the Crazy Horse Saloon in an Old West outfit, singing You Make Me Feel So Young to a little boy or an old man in the audience. The schedule was brutal: nine shows a day, and twelve on the long day, when her group covered for the other one's day off. "That's a lot of experience," she says, "by the time I was 21."
Her father did approve of one thing. Her mother was a journalist, and Betty was the editor of the paper at Arlington Heights High School. She worked part-time at the Fort Worth Press, where she had her own teen page, and went to TCU on a journalism scholarship.
Then she signed up for the freshman survey of theater as an elective. The teacher was Dr. Jack Cogdill, head of the theater department, and when she mentioned it at home, her mother lit up. "She said, 'Dr. Cogdill? Oh my God, he was my dancing partner, and we did shows together at Texas Tech. Go tell him that you're Betty Bob Buckley's daughter.'"
Cogdill quickly worked out the situation: a gifted kid on a journalism scholarship, with a father who didn't want her on the stage. TCU had no theater minor at the time. "He created a theater minor program at TCU for me, which was incredible," she says. Every year he picked a production for her. She played Meg in Brigadoon and Mrs. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth.
The journalism department was not pleased. "They were calling me and saying, 'What's the deal? We were expecting you to be the editor of the TCU Skiff.' And I was like, 'Well, I'm busy in theater.'" She graduated with a journalism degree and a theater minor.
Atlantic City and the agents
The pageants turned out to be useful after all. As Miss Fort Worth, Buckley was runner-up for Miss Texas, along with the talent award and Miss Congeniality. "They all thought I would win and I didn't," she says. "That's another whole story."
The producer of the Miss America pageant was there, and that fall he called. Buckley flew to Atlantic City with her mother, sang for the pageant's board, and was invited to be one of four guest entertainers who tied the show together over four nights and a national telecast. The job usually went to former Miss Americas or former state winners. She was the first local titleholder ever chosen.
"So in other words, I represented all of the losers who never make it to Atlantic City," she says. "And I was very proud of that. I was like, yes, go losers."
A South Texas dance teacher who was a fan called her nephew, Ruffin Cooper, an assistant at the Ashley Famous Agency in New York, and told him to watch. He got his boss, Roger Hess, to tune in. Right after the telecast, the agency called her in Atlantic City and asked her to come to New York.
She and her mother flew straight there. In an office on Sixth Avenue, she sang for a dozen agents "looking very important" around a table. When she finished, a famously tough agent named Eric Shepherd stood up, said "Sign her," and walked out.
Hess, who became her agent and later a Broadway producer and remains a dear friend, wanted her in New York right away. She told him no. She was a junior, and her father would kill her if she didn't finish college. "He said, 'OK, you go finish TCU, but we'll start your contract as soon as you graduate.'"
The USO tour
She graduated at 20 and turned 21 that summer, 1968, on a USO tour with Miss America, Debbie Bryant, and a small group of state titleholders. Buckley was the singer and dancer holding it together.
They were supposed to go to Vietnam. Shortly before they left, USO performers were killed there, and the tour was diverted to Japan and South Korea instead. They played the military hospitals in Japan, where American servicemen too badly wounded to make it home were being treated, and every base in South Korea, where there was still fighting along the DMZ.
"I saw the results of war when I was 21," she says. Her father had raised her to see the world in black and white, and what she saw on that tour didn't fit. "After the experience of witnessing war, and the damage to these beautiful young men, I came back and I was very depressed."
The Fort Worth Press had held her job, and she went back to it. "But I was shaking and crying a lot. I'd just break down and start crying. It was like a PTSD thing." She was also getting over a painful first love affair. "It was a terrible introduction to the world of men and love."
The tire show
Then Roger Hess called to say he was coming to Dallas, and Buckley and her mother drove over to see an industrial show — a musical staged to sell a product, a big business at the time — for BF Goodrich tires, starring the comedian Flip Wilson and the band Your Father's Mustache. Midway through, they called a "local singer" up from the audience.
The only song she knew the key for with that band was You Made Me Love You. "So I sang this kick-ass version of 'You Made Me Love You,' and the band's like, yeah, and the audience went nuts." The BF Goodrich buyer put her in the show.
It toured to San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and finally Philadelphia, and paid more than she'd ever made at the newspaper. She kept her day job and flew out on weekends to come up from the audience, sing one song and sit back down. Her father couldn't object; it was a legitimate job. Everyone in Fort Worth who knew her told her to go to New York. Everyone except him.
In Philadelphia, Hess called again. He had another industrial for her, six weeks for Gimbels department store, in New York. The editor of the Press told her to go and promised to hold her job. "So my dad couldn't say no."
First day in New York
What happened next, she says, is "a true story, detail by detail."
It was January 1969. She took the train into New York, checked into the Barbizon Hotel for Women and smuggled in her little Yorkshire terrier. She had no idea how to dress for a New York winter. "I'm from Texas, and I had a little skinny leather jacket and I was freezing."
She called Roger Hess to say she'd arrived. "He goes, 'OK, you have an audition in 15 minutes at the American Theatre Laboratory. Take your music, get in a cab and go now.'"
She was the last girl on the last day of auditions for a new musical, and she didn't know what it was. Ahead of her was a beautiful redhead in a miniskirt and high-heeled boots. "I was like, oh wow, that's a New York actress. How cool." It was Donna McKechnie. Years later, when they worked together in Promises, Promises in London, Buckley told her about it.
She sang her pageant song, Rose of Washington Square, in what she calls a kick-ass arrangement, for about 11 people at a table, again looking very important.
"They're like, 'Who are you?' And I said, 'My name is Betty Lynn Buckley.' And they're like, 'Where are you from?' And I was like, 'I'm from Fort Worth, Texas,' because I had a really thick Texas accent. And they said, 'When did you get to town?' And I said, 'Today.' And they said, 'Oh my God, it's like a movie. It's like a movie.'"
They kept her for two hours. In a break, the stage manager came out to find out whether she even knew what she was auditioning for. She didn't. It was 1776, and the role was Martha Jefferson, wife of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
They taught her the scene and the song on the spot. The song, He Plays the Violin, tripped her up on the first read. "He tucks it right under his chin, and he bows, yes, he bows," she recalls, rhyming it with "cows," the way she did that day. "They're like, 'No, no, no, it's bows, as in the violin.' And I'm like, 'Oh, OK.'"
She went back to the hotel and called her mother. "I said, 'I think something really nice is about to happen.'" Then Hess called. She had the part. The next day she was in costume fittings.
The show had originally cast a classical soprano as Martha, and the scene wasn't working. It's a respite from the debates: Jefferson has writer's block, so Franklin sends for his young wife. "She arrives in a cape and a hood, and Jefferson and Martha go into this long kiss on the stage," Buckley says. "I'd never even kissed a guy on stage before, and I was scared about that."
They opened in New Haven, played Washington, and came into New York that spring. 1776 was a huge hit. She'd landed her first Broadway show on her first day in New York City.
Schooled by the founding fathers
The company was mostly men, and mostly serious actors who could sing rather than standard musical theater performers: Howard Da Silva as Franklin, William Daniels as John Adams, Paul Hecht as Dickinson. Virginia Vestoff played Abigail Adams, and Gretchen Cryer, the writer of I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, was the standby.
"I was so blessed," Buckley says. "They were all really kind to me, and they taught me how to dress for cold weather. They sat me down and said, 'Look, this is what you're good at. This is what you need to learn. These are the schools you need to go to to learn that.' They really influenced my direction and reinforced my goals for myself. So I did everything they said, and ultimately became a good actress from the schools they sent me to."
She went on to play Fran Kubelik in Promises, Promises in London for a year, and then Catherine in Pippin on Broadway. Looking back on the whole path, she sums it up simply.
"Yes, I had brilliant teachers, beginning with my aunt, then Holloman and Howard, and then Dr. Cogdill, who provided an opportunity for me because he recognized my talent, and he was kind enough to recognize the obstacles in my family life," she says. "And then, of course, my mother, who was the driving force to provide me with opportunities. My career is about people who opened doors for me, who recognized me and recognized the struggles that went along with that, and then helped provide the opportunity so that I could do what I'm here to do. And that's really the truth about my whole life."
"It's my turn"
For a generation of theatergoers, Betty Buckley will always be Grizabella, and she describes the role as a turning point in how she understood her own craft. "Grizabella was my breakthrough of understanding of how to work," she says.
By then she'd studied for 13 years with a voice teacher she calls brilliant, and with Stella Adler in New York and Los Angeles. She'd made her first film, Carrie, playing the gym teacher, and then spent four years on Eight Is Enough. She describes the series as "a thwarted creative experience" but also "a school in big business show business." It let her develop as an actress and watch herself do it on film: that works, that doesn't. All the while, she flew back to New York every six weeks for a voice lesson.
When Eight Is Enough ended, her agent called about a show about cats. Everyone already had the London cast album. Buckley learned Memory listening to Elaine Paige, went in and auditioned. The answer came back no.
"They said, 'We're looking for somebody who's petite, because Elaine Paige is a petite person, and who radiates death and dying. And Betty is tall and she radiates health and well-being.'" She still finds it funny. "It's such a backward compliment."
She told her agent they'd be back. "I knew it was my part. I knew it was my turn," she says. She'd done 1776, Promises, Promises in London and Pippin. "All of those were great jobs, but I had yet to make that moment of: this is who I am as an actress-singer. It's not just about the singing. It's about a quality of acting, an emotional truth, which was my goal. And I set about to learn how to do that."
Six months passed. The search ran through everybody in New York and Los Angeles, and every week Page Six reported another star who wanted Grizabella, Cher among them. Buckley was apartment hunting. "Everywhere I went, I saw Cats memorabilia. There were little statues of cats. There were cats everywhere. And I was like, it's my part. I know it's coming."
Then the call came: they wanted to see her again.
The callback was on the stage of the Winter Garden. Trevor Nunn was there, with Andrew Lloyd Webber, choreographer Gillian Lynne and the producers, the Shuberts and David Geffen among them. She sang Memory. Nunn came up on stage and directed her three times. "No, more suicidal. More suicidal. More suicidal."
"So the third time I sang it, I felt like I was inside out," she says. "I thought, I don't know what they're talking about. That's the best I can do."
Nunn still didn't look convinced. So she walked to the edge of the stage.
"I said, 'Mr. Nunn, can I talk to you?' And he said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'So you've seen all of these girls who can play this part, and there are a lot of people who can play it as well as I can.' And then I looked him right in the eye. I said, 'But nobody can do it better. And it's my turn.'"
He looked at her like she was an alien. She started babbling about the TV show she'd just done, felt foolish, excused herself and left. The rehearsal pianist gave her a thumbs up. So did the stage manager, who told her, "No, Betty. There are times that we have to speak up for ourselves." On her way out she passed Terrence Mann, who smiled at her.
There were no cell phones, so she found a phone booth and called her agent, Joanna Ross, who was British. Ross was not encouraging. "She said, 'Oh my God, Betty, when are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut? He's a British director. He ran the RSC. He doesn't want to hear from a Texas girl telling him anything at all.'"
Convinced she'd blown it, Buckley took herself to her favorite restaurant, Woods on Madison Avenue in the East 60s, to sit with what she calls her loudmouth nature. The restaurant's phone rang. It was for her. It was Ross.
"She goes, 'You got the part.' And I was like, what?"
Trevor Nunn, she says, is her hero. He went on to direct her in Sunset Boulevard in London and New York. "I love this guy," she says. "You have to understand."
She has embraced the new generation's take on the show, too. She caught the first preview of Cats: The Jellicle Ball downtown and went back for opening night. "I loved it," she says. "It was really innovative and exciting." She wrote about it in an op-ed for The New York Times.
Norma
If Grizabella was Buckley's breakthrough, Norma Desmond was her stand. The role is often played for camp. Buckley never saw it that way. "I didn't play her as camp at all," she says.
The camp version lives in the cultural zeitgeist, she points out; Carol Burnett did an extreme one. Buckley went the other way. She watched the film over and over, studied the silent-era actresses Norma is drawn from, including Clara Bow and Louise Brooks, and read their biographies. "It wasn't camp to me."
The road to the role was, in her words, a long story, and a famous one. As she tells it, Patti LuPone created Norma in London with a contract that gave her the option of Broadway and Los Angeles. The London reviews were mixed. Frank Rich of The New York Times, then powerful enough to make or break a show, argued after seeing London that Norma should have a much lower voice, not the high belt that LuPone — and Buckley — are known for. "There was just a handful of us that really knew how to do that in that time," Buckley says.
Lloyd Webber got nervous. Los Angeles opened with Glenn Close, whose darker take drew raves, and the creative team decided that was the way to go. Then, just as Buckley was boarding a plane to London to take over from LuPone, Lloyd Webber announced Close would open the show on Broadway. Buckley took over the role of Norma Desmond on Broadway.
LuPone sued. "More power to her," Buckley says. "She has a pool in her country house that she calls the Andrew Lloyd Webber tribute pool. And I love Patti. I love Patti."
Buckley arrived in London in the middle of that, with the press consumed by whether Norma should have a low voice or a high one. "It was insane." They had already put her through a full audition, which struck her as odd, since she'd starred for them in Cats and in Lloyd Webber's Song and Dance. She watched the standby perform — "she was quite good" — and knew exactly what she wanted to do differently.
She was on the phone constantly with her therapist of ten years. "I said, 'I'm not going to do it like that.' And she goes, 'Yeah, but you're going to keep your mouth shut, right? You're just going to do everything they tell you to do. And then you're going to sneak your version in.'"
It was good advice for a woman who had once told Trevor Nunn it was her turn. "If it hadn't been for her, I would've done the usual Texas girl thing," Buckley says. "I would have shot myself in the foot before I even had the chance to give them my interpretation."
The therapist had a second tip: don't pitch a British director in psychological terms. Buckley had been in therapy since she was 21 — "I had the equivalent of a master's degree in psychology, and all of the work I do is based in human psychology" — but in rehearsal she reached for the classics instead. "I'd say, 'Trevor, you know how in Greek tragedy, Medea…' And he's like, 'Oh yeah, let's try that.' More power to Trevor. I love him so much. He facilitated my interpretation."
That interpretation came from something she says she has always had: "my fingers on the pulse of where the culture is in the present moment. That's just one of the things I do, and it's innate to how I make choices as a storyteller."
"Gloria Swanson was only 49, turning 50, when she made that movie," she says. "That's how old Norma Desmond is. She's not a wretched old person who doesn't have a right to her sexuality. She was a beautiful person who had been this glorious star at 15 years old, who was then kept in this golden cage. The business moved on from silent movies to talkies, and she got lost in the fray. She's like this teenage girl with her passions that are thwarted, in a 49-year-old woman's body. I felt that she was very much entitled to her beauty and her sexuality, and I wasn't going to play it any other way."
Right up to the Broadway opening, there was talk about whether it would work. It did. The reviews in London and New York were, she says, incredible, and she credits that to the moment. "It was accurate," she says, "about how people were feeling, women especially, in 1994 and 1995, about their right to be who they are."Opening doors for others
A career built on people who opened doors has turned into nearly half a century of opening them for others.
Buckley started teaching at about 24. She'd done 1776 and a year of Promises, Promises in London and was in Pippin on Broadway when the head of the school where she was studying asked her to start a musical theater class. "I was happy to share what I could about what I'd learned," she says. "And then from there, I just kind of kept teaching."
During Cats, Terry Schreiber, the Broadway director, invited her to teach at his studio. "So I've been teaching for them for almost 50 years, I think." When COVID shut everything down, she taught three Zoom classes a week for a year and a half, and she still teaches for the T. Schreiber Studio on Zoom.
The week before Las Vegas, she's teaching a three-night workshop for the Los Angeles Musical Theatre Studio at the Odyssey Theatre, then playing a 3 pm concert with Christian Jacob at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, before heading here. Each spring she also spends five days teaching at Mercyhurst University.
The first lesson she gives her students is one she still lives by. She feels the jolt before a show as much as anyone; she simply refuses to call it stage fright.
"In fact, what I teach my students — the first lesson I teach them — is that you can't call it stage fright," she says. "It's an adrenaline rush. It's necessary for the performance state, and you have to learn to be at peace with that, welcome it and learn how to focus within it. But the minute you start calling it fear or stage fright, then you're messed up."
Her own way of finding that focus is simple. Before every show, she meditates. "I'm a meditator," she says.
The cowgirl
The one role that got away is Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. "I really wanted to do that," she says, "because I'm a cowgirl, and I thought it would have been really right for me."
She means it. Home is 35 acres in Texas, with two houses and a barn. "In Texas, if it's less than 100 acres, it's a ranchette," she says.
Horses go back to her childhood. Her father gave her her first horse when she was 10. It died when she was 12, and then came her competition horse, Black Bucket. The dream she carried from then on had two halves: succeed in show business, and then have Cutting Horses and live on a ranch.
It was September 11 that made her act on the second half. "The first thing, when we came out of the haze that created for everyone, was: oh my God, none of us know how much time we have left. I need to get my Cutting Horse."
She went on what she calls a Cutting horse quest and connected with one of the top trainers in the sport, who helped her find her first, Purple Badger. For a while she commuted from New York to learn to ride and show him. "And then I realized one day I needed to live where my horse lived." She put her Upper West Side co-op on the market, sold it, bought the ranch and moved to Texas 23 years ago.
First she checked with her agents and managers, who told her it was a short flight to Los Angeles or New York. "So I was like, OK. So I did," she says. "It's been the best thing I've ever done for myself."
It has also brought heartbreak. Purple Badger died three years after she got him, "one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life." By then she had bought Smart Skat Cat, a champion Cutting Horse, and Wild Man Bill, and kept showing them, traveling the circuit with her trainer. Both are retired now, in their twenties. Skat Cat died a year ago this November, while she was away in Los Angeles.
Family
Gay audiences have championed Betty Buckley for decades. To her, that isn't something she noticed at some point. It has always been there.
Her first great mentors, Ed Holloman and Larry Howard, the Fosse dancers who taught a seventh grader Steam Heat and told her to sing it as loud as she could, were a couple.
"I didn't have any words for what that was back then, and nobody talked about it in Fort Worth, Texas," she says. "But they were my dear mentors." She has worked in theater since she was 15. "It's just a part of my life. I never questioned it. And so thankfully gay audiences like what I do. Thankfully. That's cool."
Around the campfire
With arts funding under pressure, Buckley takes the long view.
"I think arts funding is really, really important," she says. "I think the arts will always be with us. From the time I was 21, every year on Broadway, they say Broadway's in trouble. Every year it's not. It makes a lot of money." Regional theater funding, she says, "has been seriously attacked by this ridiculous regime that we're currently dealing with, and it's going to right itself at some point. But not to worry, because human beings will always need storytelling."
"It's at the heart of who we are," she says. "It started in the earliest days of sitting around campfires and telling stories to teach the younger generation. It has an educational purpose, an inspirational purpose, a spiritual purpose and an entertainment purpose. It's always been true, since we were primitive man sitting around campfires, and it will always be true, and there will always be a way."
"We'll always need stories, and we'll always need to tell each other," she says. "It's a place we gather to help each other feel better. There it is."
Just sing the song
Buckley sums up Las Vegas in a single word — "Fun" — and she's arriving the night before the concerts for dinner and a show with friends. "I'm excited," she says.
She's still listening for the next song that will find her. Her ears run to jazz singers, Nicole Zuraitis and Cécile McLorin Salvant among them, and to pop; Sara Bareilles' new album is next on her list. Genre has never been the point. "It doesn't matter," she says. "If the song touches me, then I want to do it."
For all the stories about auditions won by force of will and roles reimagined against the odds, the best advice she ever got from Andrew Lloyd Webber was the simplest. "Just sing the song, Betty."
More than 60 years after a girl from Fort Worth was told to sing as loud as she could, that's still the job. On October 24, she'll do it twice.