In ”Aspects of Love,” Linda Balgord plays a woman with not one, not two, not even three, but four-count them-four lovers, one of them female.
That knotty situation has a lot to do with the critical complaint against Andrew Lloyd Webber`s musical, one with so entangled a romantic storyline that credulity is stretched to the limits. (The show is enjoying an endless run in London, but flopped on Broadway.) It`s even more curious, then, that this successful Toronto mounting, opening Thursday at the Civic Theatre, should star Balgord, a Chicago area veteran about as modest, unassuming and straightforward an actress as you`re likely to encounter-no flamboyant, multi- lover she.
But neither is her character, Rose, really, and that may account in some degree for her success in the part. ”It`s a very strange story,” Balgord is the first to admit. ”It`s easy to look at what these people do and say, `What a bunch of fools.` It`s also challenging, in the way it`s presented, that despite all the love complications, there`s a kind of distancing from the characters. My challenge is to overcome that distance.”
In the story, Rose meets a young man and has an affair with him. She then switches to his uncle George instead and for a brief time dallies with them both. She becomes pregnant-by whom it`s not clear-and marries George at the same time she`s flirting with a lesbian liason with George`s own mistress.
All of that`s Act One.
In Act Two, 12 years later, she has another lover, and a maturing daughter who eventually catches the eye of George`s younger nephew whom Rose so long ago rejected. Clearly, Lloyd Webber`s musical is intended as a modern carousel awhirl with both the joys and nihilism of romance.
”You see Rose at such extremes,” Balgord says. ”It`s a tricky thing to balance-to be faithful to what`s written and still somehow be vulnerable enough so that people will be interested.”
Balgord comes excellently equipped. To her sensitive, almost little-girlish demeanor, the 32-year-old performer brings a powerhouse voice that, for all its pretty tones and smoothness, comes right out of the Ethel Merman tradition. Her biggest parts here, right before she left to tackle New York, were larger than life: Fanny Brice in ”Funny Girl” at Marriott`s
Lincolnshire Theatre and Aldonza in ”Man of La Mancha” at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace.
Balgord`s stay here in the late `80s was brief but sensational. She grew up in New Lisbon, Wis., near the Wisconsin Dells, and first exercised her singing talents for the local Lutheran church. She was in graduate school in Milwaukee when a Goodman Theatre costume designer insisted she audition for Michael Maggio`s production of ”Sunday in the Park With George,” in which she played one of the two giggling sopranos attached to a pair of soldiers.
She moved here and performed in a handful of shows, serving as matinee
”Evita” replacement at Marriott and in a short string of shows at Candlelight. Well on her way to becoming one of this city`s dependable musical comedy specialists, she felt she ought to give Broadway a crack.
”I just wanted to try it, but the funny thing was, when I first arrived in New York a few years ago, just about the only auditions were for out-of-town shows.” Eventually she gave in and took the job in Toronto, partly because of Rose`s unique attributes and the chance to work with director Robin Phillips.
That`s brought her full circle back to Chicago, her career stage-managed by fate, not untypical in show business. ”I always wanted to be a serious actress and studied theater very seriously in school. But I have this voice, and these things keep coming my way.”
