Klea Blackhurst doesn't remember saying it, but she told an audience a few years back that "I'm one of the most accomplished people who has never been on Broadway." A throwaway line, perhaps, but when recently reminded of it, she said, "I'll stand by that."
With a resume packed with 30 years of credits in concert halls, nightclubs, regional theaters, CDs, and off-Broadway, she's still got her eyes on the Great White Way. "My heart's been broken in show business so many times," she said recently by phone, "but I have such high hopes for this one, and this time I'm not a placeholder for a star. Everyone really feels that, oh my God, I was born to play this."
The Broadway prospect in question is Hazel, a new musical based on the comic strip and 1960s sitcom starring Shirley Booth as a lovably meddlesome maid working for an archetypical middle-class family of the era. Blackhurst heads to Chicago in a few weeks to begin rehearsals at the Drury Lane Theatre, where the musical opens on April 6.
But first Blackhurst is returning to San Francisco, where she has frequently performed, to benefit a theater for which she has a particularly warm affection. She is the headliner for 42nd Street Moon's annual fundraising dinner gala, set for Bimbo's 365 Club on Feb. 10. Dubbed Falling in Love with Love, the evening is dedicated to the theater's outgoing co-founder and artistic director Greg MacKellan.
Blackhurst has twice starred in Moon productions, Call Me Madam and Red, Hot, and Blue, and has also performed at other Moon functions where she has gotten to know MacKellan and his mission for finding new life for often-neglected musicals. Her repertoire, she said, will be aimed at "reflecting the love Greg has for what he does."
You can be sure Ethel Merman will be represented, since Blackhurst has become so closely associated with Broadway's brassy dame. Both her Moon musicals starred her in roles Merman created, and she has also widely performed her Merman tribute show Everything the Traffic Will Allow. On top of all that, she has been involved in a new book musical with an original score, playing Merman who takes a nervous child performer under her wing, and a studio recording of Merman's Apprentice has recently been released.
If she sings a song from Merman's Apprentice, she said it will be "Taking the Veil." In it Merman sings of a kind of religious devotion that pulls certain people into the theater. And she'll likely sing a song from Hazel, a romantic ballad titled "He Just Happened to Me" when the title character finds a new love interest.
"The reason I'm a little loosey-goosey with the song list is because my musical director of 20 years, Michael Rice, is coming with me," Blackhurst said. "We have a big trunk of songs, so that means almost the sky's the limit because I can shift gears, like, 10 minutes before a show and have him right in sync with me."
Blackhurst has a big and inviting voice, but she wasn't easy to cast when she was the age to be playing ingenue roles. She figures her age and her type are coming into alignment, but she wasn't just sitting around before. "I have never really gotten to the point of taking 'no' as an answer," she said. "The Merman show started because I was not going to wait for permission for someone to let me have a relationship with this material."
A native of Salt Lake City, and part of a big Mormon family, she recently moved up to Harlem with an actress she has been dating for a couple of years. Blackhurst said her sexual identity "is probably the main reason I'm not a Mormon anymore."
Being coupled with someone who is 17 years younger has been an eye-opening experience for Blackhurst. "It's interesting to be with someone for whom that is not an issue generationally," she said. "When I moved to New York, you could be living or sleeping with whoever you wanted, but you didn't say it in a work setting. I may have been more cowardly than some people, but I don't think I was completely delusional in not wanting to be open about that. It's been a tough one for me over the years to finally realize no one cares."
Blackhurst vividly remembers when her own closet doors opened widely for her. "An interviewer said, 'Are you in-out or out-out?' and I was shocked by that, but by the end of the conversation, I said, 'I'm out-out.'"
For ticket information on the 42nd Street Moon gala featuring Klea Blackhurst on Feb. 10, go to 42ndstmoon.org.