Betty Buckley leads ‘Hello, Dolly!’ tour into Las Vegas

Betty Buckley does Las Vegas like a champ.

In town for a four-day run of her cabaret show in late 2012, the Tony winner took in “Chippendales,” “Zumanity,” “Absinthe” and “Mystere.”

She’s on the lookout for something new to see this week, during the little downtime she’ll have from starring in “Hello, Dolly!” at The Smith Center, even though she admits she won’t be able to keep up that previous night-on-the-town pace.

“This eight-show a week tour is really a very demanding thing. I basically live a very monastic life,” says Buckley, 71. The national tour’s taxing schedule — traveling on Mondays, nightly shows Tuesdays through Sundays, plus weekend matinees — doesn’t leave time for much beyond exercising, vocalizing and getting enough rest and meditation.

“There are several of us in the show, we call ourselves The Grown-ups. And then the rest of the company is just the young, beautiful, gifted angels who can do everything: sing, dance, act. And they party all the time,” she says, laughing. “I’m quite envious of their stamina and the fact that they can do all that and see the world.”

Drawn to diverse roles

Buckley is the rare performer who has two very distinct careers and followings.

Esteemed Broadway legend Betty Buckley made a name for herself starring in the musicals “1776” and “Pippin” and as the original “Memory”-singing Grizabella in “Cats,” for which she earned the Tony.

Then there’s TV and movie Betty Buckley, who, aside from the four seasons she spent on “Eight Is Enough,” has been drawn to some really unsettling projects over the years.

That’s her as gym teacher Miss Collins in “Carrie” and as Suzanne Fitzgerald, the prison-teaching mother of inmate Ryan O’Reilly (Dean Winters) in the brutal HBO drama “Oz.”

Buckley worked with her psychologist to research her role as Karen Fletcher, the doctor who tries to help James McAvoy’s Kevin with his dissociative identity disorder in 2017’s “Split.” That was her second movie with writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, following 2008’s “The Happening.”

Most recently, she co-starred in a seasonlong arc on AMC’s “Preacher” — the supernatural drama that also counts among its characters a vampire, Adolf Hitler and a kid known as Arseface — as voodoo sorceress Marie L’Angelle.

“I trained for years and years and years to be an actress who could play really emotionally complicated, psychologically complex characters,” Buckley says of those darker roles.

‘You can only do what you do’

“Now I’m playing one of the most wonderful people in the world, who’s such a joyous being,” she adds.

In January 2018, Buckley was in New Orleans for her first week on “Preacher” when she was offered the lead role in the national tour of the “Hello, Dolly!” revival. The previous year, the new version of the Jerry Herman musical — about matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi and her quest to marry off “half-a-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder in turn-of-the-past-century Yonkers, New York — scored four Tony Awards, including best revival of a musical and one for its star, Bette Midler.

“I’ve seen many versions of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ since I was a teenager, and I was never really engaged with the show,” Buckley reveals. After she saw Midler in this version, she says, “Then I understood the show for the first time, and I was so touched by it.”

Just don’t ask Buckley to compare her version of Dolly to the one portrayed by Midler — or by Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Pearl Bailey or any of the other heavy hitters who’ve taken on the role over the decades.

“It’s not hard to develop a new take, and I didn’t come into it, like, ‘I’ve gotta find a new take,’ ” she says. “You can only do what you do. You have your own particular skill set. You’re your own individual with your own unique perspective on the world and people.”

‘It’s a fantastic job’

The actress says she’s studied comparative world religions since she was in her 20s and spends long retreats in Zen monasteries. She also drops phrases such as “personality construct” when describing roles.

“I don’t believe that human beings compare. We don’t compare. So, being a person who’s a philosopher and considers things like this, playing Dolly Levi and being asked over and over again to compare it to the wonderful, wonderful ladies who have brought their own experience to Dolly Levi is kind of crazy,” Buckley says. “Of course it will be different because everyone’s different.”

She faced the same questions 25 years ago when she took over the role of “Sunset Boulevard’s” Norma Desmond from Patti LuPone in London’s West End and Glenn Close on Broadway.

“So the world of ‘my diva is better than your diva’ kind of thing, I had to walk through that back then. I was just like, ‘Oh, God. We have to go through that again?’ ” Buckley laments. “But it’s worth it. … It’s such a blessing. It’s a fantastic job, and the show is just beautiful.”

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.