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DIVA TALK: Catching Up with Juno's Victoria Clark Plus News of Rivers, Menzel and More
By Andrew Gans
21 Mar 2008
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Tony Award winner Victoria Clark
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News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage.
VICTORIA CLARK
Victoria Clark, the dynamic singing actress who brings dramatic depth, flawless comic timing and a rangy, powerful soprano to all her work, returns to the City Center stage this month in the latest Encores! production, Joseph Stein and Marc Blitzstein's little-known 1959 musical Juno.
Juno — which runs March 27-30 and co-stars Celia-Keenan Bolger, Michael Arden and Conrad John Schuck — marks Clark's third Encores! outing. Her debut with the famed series came in the 2004 staging of the Michael Stewart-Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical Bye Bye Birdie. "I've known [casting director] Jay Binder forever," Clark recently told me, "and I adore him. He called me up and said, 'Will you do me a favor and play Walter Bobbie's wife [Mrs. MacAfee] in [Birdie]?' He said, 'Someday we'll find a nice [role] for you, but . . . I need you to come in and be funny.' I love Jerry Zaks, and Jerry was directing it. I thought, 'You know what? I love Walter, I love Jerry.' We had done Guys and Dolls together, and I thought, 'Gosh, I haven't seen Jerry in ages. Let me just go do this.' And, I had a ball. Jerry's really brilliant with these things — he works really fast. He gave me one piece of direction, and I just ran with it. It was a lot of fun."
Clark, who won a Tony Award for her beautiful, moving performance as Margaret Johnson in The Light in the Piazza, is equally enthusiastic about her second Encores! production, which cast the Tony winner as the vulnerable, emotionally fragile Sally Durant Plummer in last season's thrilling mounting of the classic Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical Follies. "The funny thing with Follies," Clark says, "is that I thought I was too young to do it. I thought Sally would be in another ten years. It's absolutely age appropriate to me right now, but in my head, since I've worked on it since college days, it was always the 'someday' role.
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Victoria Clark and Victor Garber in Follies
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
"Sally's the one who is really deluded about where she is," Clark continues. "It's hard for her to think realistically and pragmatically about things, so it was a nice connection that I had with that character. It just could not sink into me that I was actually the correct age to play it!"
Clark shared the City Center stage with another Tony-winning actress, Donna Murphy, who played the brittle Phyllis Rogers Stone. Playing opposite Murphy, Clark says, was "amazing. She gives a lot onstage — she has a lot of energy, and she's very fun backstage. She's very, very focused, but also she knows how to have fun. We talked about being a mom a lot; we talked about our kids and shared that experience. I just admire her so much. It was really a wonderful blessing for me to be able to work with her. Donna's been a big part of my learning experience, watching her work."
For those who have not had the chance to enjoy an Encores! production, it should be noted that the musicals are presented with minimal costumes and scenery and a large orchestra situated onstage. Acting onstage with the orchestra Clark says is "thrilling. For musical actors, the entire subtext is in the music." And, although critics are invited to review Encores! productions after one public performance, Clark says she doesn't let that affect her work. "If we didn't want people to look at us and make commentary, we shouldn't become actors," she says. "You basically open yourself up for commentary by just choosing this career, so I never worry about it. I want to be good, and I want to make the storytelling clear, but that's just the nature of the beast. If you say yes to an Encores! production, part of what you're accepting is that the critics are going to be coming ten days after you start rehearsal. That's just the way it is."
Clark says the key to succeeding in Encores! productions, which are rehearsed and presented to audiences within a two-week period, is preparation. "You can study the script," she laughs. "Just because you're not in the rehearsal room [yet] doesn't mean you can't [prepare]. It's really like summer stock in New York — really fancy summer stock!"
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Victoria Clark in The Light in the Piazza
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| photo by Liz Lauren |
Having Birdie and Follies under her belt, Clark says that knowing what to expect during the rehearsal process will be especially useful as she prepares to star in her third Encores! production, Juno. "I always do better if I know what to expect," Clark explains. "I can usually execute things better if I know what the plan is. [Director] Bart [Sher] and I always worked that way on Piazza. I would say, 'What's the plan for the day?' The preview period [for Piazza] was excruciating — I was on my feet four hours a day while performing the show every night. . . . So he'd come into my dressing room at noon and just say, "Here's what we're going to do. This is the order we're going to do it in; this is what I'm looking for; these are the things we have to fix." . . . So that's the thing with Encores — it's like, 'Okay, I kind of know the schedule. I know it's going to be fun.' And, usually you know one or two of the actors [who will also be in the cast]. [Juno] is going to be with [former Light in the Piazza co-star] Celia [Keenan-Bolger], so I'm all set there. That's the major relationship for me in the show, so that's a great head start."
Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel first mentioned the possibility of mounting a production of Juno to Clark over three years ago. "He's very, very fond of the show and thought that it was a perfect project for Encores!," says Clark. "They really discover these little gems — that's one of the things they do best is finding shows that people don't really know or that have been forgotten for various reasons. [Juno] was created for Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas. They were non-singers, but Agnes De Mille was the choreographer, and there were dream ballets, and it has an unbelievable score by Marc Blitzstein, who wrote Regina and Cradle Will Rock."
Juno, which is based on the Sean O'Casey play Juno and the Paycock, is described in a press notes as the chronicling of "the disintegration of an Irish family in Dublin in the early 1920s during the confrontation between the Irish Republican Army and the British." O'Casey's play, Clark explains, is set "in 1922 right in the middle of the Irish Civil War, which is a piece of Irish history that is very tricky. It's very tricky because there was a War of Independence that they sort of won against England, but then there were some factions who wanted a treaty, who wanted to make concessions to still be connected to Britain, and others who didn't. So there was a Civil War that broke out. The play is set during the Civil War, and the musical is set a few years prior to that during the War of Independence. It's a politically hot issue. O'Casey was right in the middle of it. He was very politically involved himself. To musicalize something like that would, of course, appeal to Blitzstein, who went right after all those hard topics. [With] Cradle Will Rock he was right in the middle of the WPA commission and bucking the system right and left."
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Clark and Conrad John Schuck will co-star in Juno
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Clark thinks presenting Juno at this juncture in our own country's history is particularly timely: "It's an interesting piece to revive now because it really does look at the cost of war. The piece is basically about a family who is living in a tenement in Dublin, and this mother trying to hold this family together. The son has already lost an arm to fighting and has the IRA after him, and [she has a] husband who keeps getting out of work. She is actually supporting the whole family. Her daughter has a factory job but is on strike. So nobody is bringing in income except for her, and she is trying to keep body and souls together and keep everybody in good spirits. [Juno Boyle is a] a very strong, iconic character."
Clark is particularly fond of Blitzstein's score, which features the haunting ballad "I Wish It So" as well as "We're Alive" and "One Kind World." "There is some beautiful singing, and there's a lot of choral singing. In my opinion it's Blitzstein's answer to Street Scene," Clark says. "It's his version of that gorgeous Kurt Weill opera. It's very similar — the whole community is affected and struggling, but you see the political situation through one family's eyes. It's a beautiful story. It's definitely a tragedy, but it's told in this Irish way, which has a lot of wit and a lot of humor and a lot of practical common sense. I think it's a beautiful piece. I really do. I'm very excited about it."
Clark says it has been particularly interesting approaching a score that was written for non-singers. "It was sort of a brilliant idea to ask Shirley Booth to do a musical," she says. "I love the concept of that, but then ultimately they had to move keys. We were exploring the keys for this show and realized [that] when you get to certain point in my voice, it sounds kind of romantic, and is that really appropriate for the character? . . . The keys were set for a non-singer, but in the end it's appropriate that they sit a little bit lower — that they sit in more of a speaking range — because of who she is and her job in the family is pragmatic."
Although Encores! presents only five performances of its shows, Clark approaches her roles in the City Center productions with the same intensity and dedication she would give to a part in a Broadway run. "I'm serious about this stuff," she says, adding with a laugh, "I don't play around. I think the world of Encores! I think what they do is really important. . . . You can't just get up and read the script. You have to bring as much as you can. As an actor, I feel like it's my responsibility to bring everything I can, body and soul, to these things. Otherwise there's no way you can see what the piece really is. Originally the shows went through full rehearsal periods, and the actors really had time to live with these [characters.] You just can't do it in a week. There's no way."
"I do take [my work] seriously," Clark adds. "Maybe I take it too seriously, [but] I feel like God blessed me with a good brain, and if this is what I chose to do, then I'm going to treat it as seriously as possible. Not that I'm not going to have fun, but I'm going to put the same amount of work that I would put into it if I were a lawyer or a physician or anything else. I'm going to treat it seriously, and I'm going to use the gifts that God gave me, and really see what's behind this material, and that's what I try to teach my students to do, too. You can use your intelligence to be an artist. You don't have to abandon all of your intelligence just because you're doing something that you enjoy." To that end, Clark even journeyed to Ireland to meet with Juno director Garry Hynes, who Clark says is "unbelievable. I'm obsessed with her!"
As for future projects, Clark says there are few items she can't yet discuss, but "there's always stuff keeping me busy — a lot of teaching going on and some other new projects that I'm spearheading. . . It's always the grass is always greener. When I'm in a show, I wish I had more time with my family, wish I had more time with my son, and I'm exhausted all the time. And then when I'm not in a show, I'm thinking, 'When's the next big show going to come? Do I really want a show or maybe I should be doing more film and television?' And then you get a film and you're like, 'Oh, but then I can't do this show,'" she laughs.
"I think the secret to being happy as an actor in New York," Clark concludes, "is to just absorb part of it and accept it and stay open to the creative opportunities and not see a long period of unemployment as a bad thing, but that's the time when you're supposed to be resting and planting seeds for your own creative work. I'm not the kind of actor who can just go from one project to the next. I really have to rest, and I have to think about what I want to say. I really have to know what I'm saying as a person. I just can't get up there and show people the same tricks I did in the last one. It's not appealing to me. I'm just too old for that," she laughs.
[Show times for Juno are March 27 and 28 at 8 PM, March 29 at 2 and 8 PM and March 30 at 6:30 PM. City Center is located in Manhattan at West 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Tickets are available by calling (212) 581-1212 or by visiting www.nycitycenter.org.] Continued...
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