By Doug Hoagland

Meg Clark learned early as a performer – she was only 8 – what not to do on stage.

She was making her Valley debut in a Good Company Players production of “Our Town.” One night, she stood on a ladder on a bare set, forgot her lines and exclaimed, “Oh, shoot!”

Later, Clark says, the show’s director “lovingly but firmly explained” that her admission to the audience was a mistake. It was a lesson learned, but props to Clark’s 8-year-old self for an honest reaction.

Now 28, Clark has for the last decade brought her adult brand of honesty, vulnerability and power to roles as varied as libertine Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” and plucky Belle in “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.”

She’s acted and sung in 18 theater productions across the Valley since 2016, and I’ve seen most of them. Season tickets took me to many of her shows. A few times I parked myself in a seat because I knew Clark was in the cast.

I’m a fan.

Good reviews have followed many of her performances. My TMR colleagues Donald Munro and Heather Parish leave me in the dust when it comes to critiquing productions and performances with smart and penetrating analysis. That’s not in my wheelhouse.

I only know when an actor seizes the moment and leads me to a zone where my attention turns to concentration and nothing else intrudes. Produce enough of those moments in enough memorable productions – as Clark has done – and fans follow.

So this article is an appreciation of Clark as she reprises her leading role in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” for GCP through March 16. Mixed in will be insights from her about performing – the pressures, the joys and even the time she went after a defining role with a self-described chip on her shoulder.

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A show goes on

Clark and I met to talk about all this on a cold but sunny Saturday in January at Gazebo Gardens. As we sat outside, customers wandered among the plants and several trains roared by. She was sincere but not naive, quick to praise other performers and easily candid about her personal life.

I began by taking us back to the theater at Reedley High School. The year: 2013.

Reedley High students were rehearsing “West Side Story” under the direction of actor/director Mark Norwood, the creative force behind Reedley’s River City Theatre Company. Early in rehearsals, the girl cast as Maria dropped out of the show. So the understudy – 16-year-old Clark – stepped into the role. “Meg stunned audiences with her nuanced and powerful portrayal,” Norwood recently told me.

I saw that show as the editor of Reedley’s weekly newspaper. I remember her voice.

Clark says, “It was one of those the-show-must-go-on moments. I worked really hard on the music, but looking back on my decision to play the role, it’s not something I would do today.” The reason: Maria is Puerto Rican, and a Latina should have had the role, Clark says. But at 16 in a conservative environment, she didn’t consider not playing Maria.

Then life opened for Clark – she went to college, she found new friends, she matured. Pity the person at 28 who isn’t different from their 16-year-old self. “I was exposed to dialogue about systemic issues of white supremacy,” Clark says. “There’s so much of it, even in the theater world, which we think is a haven for progressives. I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who helped expand my perspective.”

Clark’s willingness to embrace such change would propel her beyond playing the sweet ingenue or chaste love interest into darker, albeit, more interesting roles.

First, some resumé fill-in. Clark racked up stage time in a dozen or more productions for the River City Theatre Company before she was 18. After high school, she attended Fresno Pacific University and graduated with a degree in history. Eager to prove herself in Fresno’s theater community – but also nervous about doing so – she auditioned for a 2016 GCP production of “My Fair Lady.” Cast as the understudy for Eliza Doolittle, Clark performed several times when the actor in that role was unable to.

Major roles followed in shows that make up the canon of golden American musicals: “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Guys and Dolls” – both for GCP – and “The Fantasticks” for StageWorks Fresno. Clark also played in a more contemporary classic: “Into the Woods” for the Madera Theatre Project.

Those shows allowed Clark to stay comfortably in a performing lane that required strong vocals and acting that relied on a likable stage presence. That’s not a criticism. There’s a lot to be said for consistency and bringing the goods every time the stage lights come up.

Doing so is part of an actor’s obligation to the audience and to herself, Clark says: “It’s important to strive for quality work. Everyone I know takes it seriously because what’s the point of doing it if you don’t care. I believe in the work I’m doing, and I believe in the work everyone does.”

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Letting loose

As Clark settled into the local acting community, she began to show her range.

In a StageWorks’ production of “The Full Monty,” Clark revelled in leather pants as a randy wife shaking it up with girlfriends at a strip club. A PG-13 warning to her father seemed necessary. “I had to say, ‘OK, Dad, this show might be, you know, a little different to watch,’ ” she recalls, chuckling.

Then in the musical “Young Frankenstein” for GCP, she played for laughs – and got them – as the nubile Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s lab assistant who yodels through a “A Roll in the Hay.”

Talented actor/singer/dancer Shawn Williams played Dr. Frankenstein. In one scene, he and Clark were on a gurney, under a sheet, trying to control their laughter as they waited to be revealed as lovers. Clark would whisper a reminder to Williams – “Is your zipper down?” – about his scripted wardrobe malfunction in the next scene. “Always looking out for her fellow actor and the joke,” Williams says. He adds these descriptions of Clark: “supportive, collaborative, understands that teamwork makes any show better.”

But Clark’s true breakout performances came in “Spring Awakening” and “Cabaret,” both for the Selma Arts Center. Neither show has a hint of sweetness nor sentimentality, with adolescent sexuality at the center of “Spring Awakening” and the rise of Nazism looming large in “Cabaret.”

In “Spring Awakening,” Clark was Ilse, a young woman sexually abused by her father. The show’s storyline deals with sexual repression, homosexuality, abortion and suicide. Clark – who was raised as a churchgoer and graduated from a Christian university – had no hesitation about the show’s subject matter. “By that time in my life, no church community pressure would have stopped me from the show,” she says.

That dark turn in “Spring Awakening” was followed by Clark’s defiant resolve to prove something in “Cabaret.”

“I had a chip on my shoulder,” she says of the decision to audition. “I don’t think people thought I could do this, and I didn’t even know if I could do it. But that motivated me all the more.”

To portray Sally Bowles, who’s written as minimally talented, Clark “couldn’t sing pretty,” as she puts it. “I had to find the balance of how do I not hurt myself vocally, still have power and not worry about polishing the edges of songs.”

The acting challenge was the steepest she’s ever faced. One website describes Bowles as eccentric, vivacious, flippant, sexy and unstable.
“I was emotionally vulnerable at that time in my personal life and on the precipice of self discovery,” Clark says. “I was able to use that in the role, but it was the first time I ever completely let go. I was raw, and that’s how I came at Sally.”

Clark’s performance drew raves. “Her giddy, calculated, naive and forceful characterization is a bundle of contradictions, yet she somehow blends them into a complicated whole,” wrote Munro in TMR. Clark’s delivery of “Cabaret’s” two signature songs – “Maybe This Time” and “Cabaret” – were “hugely powerful and memorable for vastly different reasons,” Munro added. “By showing us this range of character, Sally seems even more alive.”

Personal turmoil roiled Clark coming into the show. She was sad because her first adult relationship had recently ended, and she questioned who she was without her boyfriend. Then came other questions: “Who am I as a person? Who am I as an actor? ”

During the run of “Cabaret,” she answered the actor question. “I learned I didn’t have to be limited to a certain performing box. I’d always thought of myself as a singer. Now for the first time, I felt comfortable calling myself an actor.”

A year later, she answered one part of the person question when she came out as queer, she says. Clark is now engaged to a fellow Fresno Pacific graduate, Sadie Cobb, who proposed on New Year’s Eve 2024.

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‘A moment of clarity’

A new character – and challenge – came to Clark as she prepped for GCP’s initial offering of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” in 2024. She’d be portraying a person still living whose songs are well known – especially to the Baby Boomers in the audience who helped buy more than 25 million copies of King’s “Tapestry” album in the early 1970s.

As rehearsals continued, Clark found herself sinking under the weight of her perfectionism. How could she do King without lapsing into imitation or caricature? She also was making medical and financial decisions for a close family member who was seriously ill. It was stress upon stress.

Then came a moment of clarity. “It was something my therapist said to me about playing Carole King that also applied to my personal life. ‘Whatever you have to offer today will be enough,’ That’s become my mantra for life.”

Clark brought more than enough to 2024’s “Beautiful” – so much so that GCP brought the show back one year later with her again in the lead.

I saw 2025’s “Beautiful” on opening weekend in mid-January. In a cast full of powerhouse singers (Jonathan Wheeler, Haleigh Cook, Adrian Ammsso, Janet Glaudé, Camille Gaston, Trinity Mikel, Ed Burke, tony sanders, Rex McTeer and Sam Szpor), Clark somehow reaches a higher level. The songs offer the opportunity for something special, and Clark takes full advantage with an ease that belies a well-honed ability to inhabit every shade of a lyric.

“Beautiful” director Laurie Pessano says Clark is a “fabulous vocalist” who was “able to alter her normal style and quality” to achieve “the essence of an era she never experienced firsthand.” The show’s timeline is 1958 to 1971. Clark was born in 1996.

“Meg is also an extremely honest and smart actor, and her intrinsic warmth as a human pulls an audience to her pretty instantly,” Pessano says. “Her work ethic, intelligence, openness to direction, teamwork, and easy humor are a director’s dream.”

In her review for TMR, Parish says: “It is Clark’s impressive performance as King, spilling over with self-effacing humor and vulnerability, that grounds the musical and gives the audience something to root for.”

Clark’s talent – and temperament – will always demand a price from her. Since her days at Reedley High, she’s searched for the balance between always asking herself to become better and knowing when she’s done her best in the moment she occupies.

“I certainly don’t have perfection to offer because it’s not possible and also not interesting,” Clark says. “But what I have to give is going to be honest and true to me, and that’s all I can do.”

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