Just because she's playing a woman who lives in the past is no reason to presume Petula Clark does likewise.

"I'm very much of the moment," said the singer/actress now embodying the role of silent screen star Norma Desmond in the kinder, gentler touring production of "Sunset Boulevard" ensconced at the Merriam Theater. "Truth is, I'm hopeless with dates, with anything that has to do with numbers. And I'm not a bit nostalgic, don't much care for dwelling in the past."

Yet it's equally clear that Clark is bringing a lot of herself to the role of Norma Desmond in Susan L. Schulman's new staging of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, as Clark previously did helming the "flagship" production in London's West End directed by Trevor Nunn.

"This new production is quite different, smaller and more intimate, but I'm playing her the same," Clark commented at the theater, the morning after her tender, opening-night performance won an equally heartfelt standing ovation from first-nighters.

The 66-year-old entertainer allows that she didn't much care for the Desmond character -- or that of her young romantic interest Joe Gillis -- when Clark first "paid my money to go see the show on Broadway, with Glenn Close in the lead. I was awed by the physical production, but I wasn't moved by it. I didn't like Norma Desmond, I didn't like Joe. To me, it was a show about this monstrous woman and this detestable gigolo."

So when Nunn asked her to do it in London three years ago, Clark "spent three hours at the Really Useful Productions office with him, trying to convince him that it was a very bad idea. Obviously, he was more convincing than I was. I remember saying to him, 'What makes you think I can play this? I've never been asked to play somebody so far away from my own persona.' And he said, 'Because you're a wonderful actress, that's why.' I said, 'Don't you want me to read for you?' He said, 'Of course not.' I said, 'Do you want me to sing?' 'Good God, no.' So I said, 'Do you want me to see the movie?' He said, 'No.' I knew that he'd told Elaine Paige to see it, and she did, 40-odd times. Why didn't he want me to see it? He said, 'Don't ask, just do it.'

"Then once I was in rehearsal, I asked, 'What do you think I can bring, because I think every woman who's played it has brought something of herself to the part.' And he said -- 'Vulnerability.' "

Americans might not have suspected such trust in Clark from Nunn or Lloyd Webber, who "never came to see me perform the role until my London opening night," she said.

You might recall that Lloyd Webber threw such a hissy fit over Faye Dunaway's interpretation and singing for the L.A. production that he opted to close the show and pay her off with $1 million rather than see his vision maligned.

While Clark has previously appeared on these shores in a few films and the stage production of "Blood Brothers," she is still regarded primarily as a pop singer, and best remembered for her enormous success in the mid-1960s. Riding in on the crest of the British Invasion, knocking even the Beatles off their perch with the more adult, finger-poppin'-cool sounds of "Downtown" and "I Know a Place," Clark scored a total of 15 Top 40 hits in a very short, three-year span. She even took home the Grammy for best rock 'n' roll recording of 1965.

Yet she now bristles at a reporter's characterization of that period as her "pop heyday." "I was singing pop music before then, and I've been singing pop music since then" (with recent albums issued Stateside on the Varese Sarabande label), she corrects.

The '60s were "just another phase" in a career that actually started when the Surrey, England-born Clark was but a sprout of a child -- a 6-year-old riding troop trains and entertaining World War II soldiers alongside another fledgling talent named Julie Andrews. "Our parents were very competitive, but we never were. We were just having fun."

By the time Clark was 8, she was "already a star" in England and not long thereafter signed an acting contract with Britain's biggest film studio, the Rank Organization. Kept in a state of perpetual youth by the studio (shades of Shirley Temple and Judy Garland), Clark had in fact made 20 films before "Downtown" broke in the States, landed her on the Ed Sullivan show and opened doors for her to appear in U.S. film productions like "Finian's Rainbow" (playing opposite Fred Astaire) and the remake of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" with Peter O'Toole.

Clark also had quite the run -- again, pre-U.S. debut -- as a pop phenomenon on the Continent. In fact, she was France's biggest star in 1962 thanks to her performance of "Chariot," a Paul Mauriat song later given English lyrics and a new vocal by Little Peggy March as "I Will Follow Him."

So there really was no need for her to audition for "Sunset Boulevard" for Messrs. Nunn and Lloyd Webber. They knew what they were getting -- a bankable, beloved, homegrown show biz phenom who would keep their London production going for another year and a half. And in large measure, she'd do so by bringing a more likable side to a character played by others as a grotesque, egotistical monster.

"I don't think it's interesting to see a play about two dislikable people," Clark declares. "And for this production, [ director ] Susan Schulman has humanized it even more, bringing the people forward, and I think she's done a wonderful job. While this production is quite beautiful, not at all some potted version of the original, the scale is smaller and the emphasis is more on the characters," the star continues. "This is not just a show about Norma Desmond, and you have to feel for those other people, too. You have to understand why Joe [ a much younger but embittered screen writer played by Lewis Cleale ] does this, moves in with her. He's not a gigolo, he's just a guy in trouble. He's broke and frustrated. And she's in trouble, too. And both grab at the same life raft."

Clark will be clinging to these ropes until at least November, completing her yearlong commitment to tour the show to 40-some cities. "After that, they're planning on settling in for a long run in Chicago to greet the new millennium, and have asked me to stay on, but we'll see," she says with a wink. "I don't know how much longer I want to put off my own projects."

Surprisingly, for one who claims to rarely glance backwards, Clark has been working on an "autobiographical show, looking back on my idea of what my childhood was like -- living in air raid shelters, sleeping in luggage racks, entertaining the troops. It seems scary now, but it wasn't then. Children find magic in everything."v Helping to bring out the wonder will be director Guy Caron, one of the French Canadian masterminds behind Cirque Du Soleil.

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