Who's Afraid of Bette Davis? Not Millicent Martin, the star of the new musical production of Baby Jane by D.L. Groover

It has taken 53 years in show business for Millicent Martin to become a celebrity. Thanks to American television, her recurring roles as Gertrude, Daphne's cantankerous mum, on Frasier, and as eccentric European socialite Ms. Faversham on Days of Our Lives have catapulted her into household fame.

Fans of the shows may think they have discovered her, but if you are a connoisseur of musicals, or know something of English theater, you are already acquainted with the versatile Miss Martin as a two-time Tony nominee (Side by Side by Sondheim and King of Hearts) and veteran actress in both musicals and dramas (Follies, 42nd Street, The Boy Friend, Shirley Valentine, Noises Off). Her "mates" include Betty White, Bea Arthur, jazz musicians John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Joan Plowright, Julie Andrews, Sean Connery (a chorus boy in the London production of South Pacific, one of Martin's first stage appearances), Dame Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Derek Jacobi. Her neighbor in Brighton was Laurence Olivier, who would chauffeur Martin from the train station. She calls pop singer Sheena Easton her adopted daughter.

But come October 9 at the Hobby Center, Martin assays the toughest role of her career and takes on the ghost of iconographic screen legend Bette Davis in the world premiere Theatre Under the Stars musical What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

"I'm very lucky," she said in a recent interview. "It's the best piece of theater for me. I'm not even nervous. It's too wonderful."

Martin has been involved with this project for six years, which could account for her lack of opening-night jitters. Producer Michael Rose, currently represented on London's East End with the hit musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, started negotiations nine years ago with Warner Bros., who owned the film rights to the 1962 cult classic. It took nearly three years to secure them, but with a stipulation. No line of film dialogue nor any situation could be used in the new play unless it came from the original novel by Henry Farrell, who Rose had signed to write the musical's libretto. Farrell could use as much of his own book as he wanted but nothing from the movie that had not first appeared in the novel.

When asked to compare her new musical with the classic movie, Martin doesn't hesitate.

"We keep everything inside the house. The whole thing about it is in her fractured mind," Martin said. "More and more as the night goes on, it's like a prison. The wonderful thing is that you go back in both Jane and Blanche's memories, back to when they were in Hollywood, so we have these wonderful flashbacks in enormous Technicolor with dancing and singing. They show how these two sisters got at loggerheads and ended up hating each other before the accident, where Blanche ends up in a wheelchair and Jane looks after her for the rest of her life"

The major change, Martin says, was the depiction of Jane's sister, Blanche (played by City of Angels' Leslie Denniston), as a movie musical star instead of a dramatic actress. Lavish production numbers, choreographed by Dan Siretta, showcase Blanche's star power while revealing Jane's jealousy.

"Obviously, it's the same story, but you find out a lot more what made these women tick and how they became what they became," Martin said. "I've never worked on something that's as scary, as sad, as moving, and as funny. It's an amazing piece and beautifully constructed. For me, this is the best thing I've ever done."

Martin was Rose's first choice for Baby Jane, as well as the first choice of director David Taylor. All three had previously worked together on the London stage.

"I've been involved with it for six years," Martin said with excitement. "Once they got it going, Michael phoned me and said, 'I hope you won't be insulted, but would you like to play Baby Jane?' I immediately said, 'Oh, boy, yes, I'd love to.'"

Ironically, Martin's husband had been talking to her about doing a musical version of Baby Jane for years. He even suggested she call her friend Stephen Sondheim to get him interested. "Oh sure, I said, just what Stephen wants to do-a commission. Not very likely. And then this happens!"

When pop composer Lee Pockriss ("Johnny Angel" and "Catch a Falling Star") and lyricist Hal Hackady (Minnie's Boys and Goodtime Charlie) had finished the score, everything was ready for a workshop performance. Although everyone involved in the show was convinced of its worthiness, there's nothing like an audience's live reaction to your pet project-"to see if it'll fly," in Martin's words.

Judging by the audience's reaction at London's Victoria Palace, Baby Jane soared, even though Pockriss's score was played on a lone piano. Orchestrations were commissioned, and a year later a concert version followed in the seaside resort of Brighton.

"It's a fantastic gay community," Martin says, "and we wanted to hear the show with a knowledgeable audience. It's been quite a while [since the film was released], and a lot of kids don't know it at all. The first two nights were wonderful. Then we got to the Wednesday matinee. This is it, we thought, this is where the crunch happens. Now we're going to get the moms, dads, and kids. But it went wonderfully with them, too. So we were really pleased. It's not just a cult thing. It really does work as a piece."

She opens her voluminous loose-leaf notebook of a script to show a costume sketch by Eduardo Sicangco, and there, paper-clipped to the inside cover, is a photograph of Charles Pierce in Bette Davis drag. Pierce, master and mistress of disguise, and the best Bette Davis impersonator in the history of the world, was a close friend of Martin's for 35 years, until his death in 1999.

"Charles Pierce, Bea Arthur, and I were like a terrible little trio," Martin says with a big smile. "He was so excited about this, he kept sending me photos. 'I'm gonna be there, I'm gonna be there,' he kept saying. And he will be. What a darling.

"The film is so great, but this is a musical, yet there's one moment at the beginning where you kind of see Bette Davis, then it's gone. It's really to let people know that we want them to laugh. We want them to know this is a black comedy. The woman is so off-the-wall. I feel it's like being a kid and dressing up, because that's what Baby Jane is. Blanche is a faded rose, and Jane is just awful. It's a good thing I don't mind looking absolutely dread-ful," she says laughing in dead-ringer Bette Davis/Charles Pierce imitation.

"I'm very blessed. At my age, I expect to be playing judges and mums sitting in the corner, knitting. But I said to my husband, 'If it ends up that I'm doing a couple of lines here and a couple of lines there, I'm packing in it.' And then came two of the best parts I've ever been offered.

"You can't label Baby Jane. It's very different. It's not camp, it's not heavy, it's got its own kind of essence. I think that's what's going to make it really interesting. I'm not going to say everybody's going to walk in the door and go Wow, but they're going to have to admit that they've not seen anything like this."