What a sexy devil

Clarke Peters moves like the Pink Panther, looks like Morgan Freeman's younger brother, believes in psychic energy and marathon Tantric sex, and sounds like Barry White. Just the right combination of grooviness and gravitas,in short, to help Sir Cameron Mackintosh's latest leading man make it through those West End nights where you need all the staying power you can get.

There's a lot riding on Clarke's charisma right now as this veteran musical performer comes to the rescue of The Witches of Eastwick, yet another Mackintosh show to be overhauled and relaunched on the choppy seas of a tempest-tossed West End. With Andrew Lloyd Webber announcing the closure of his misconceived football musical, The Beautiful Game, after only a year, Peters is tempting fate by opening in a show that premiered at the same time. Along the way, Witches lost its original leading man, Ian McShane, to a viral infection, with understudy Earl Carpenter taking over the man-devil role of Darryl Van Horne. Now, true to Mackintosh's perfectionist tradition, it has been revamped, rewritten, partly recast and rehoused, moving to the more intimate environment of the Prince of Wales Theatre to free up Drury Lane for the long-running certainty that is My Fair Lady.

Peters's and Cameron's association goes back to the late Eighties and Five Guys Named Moe, Peters's own creation. After producing it in the West End, Mackintosh is now having talks with Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks about turning Five Guys into a 13-part animated TV series. Clarke could use the dosh: he lost his Moe fortune in a disastrous holistic health club in the country, launched long before dear old Wiltshire was ready for t'ai chi, yoga, African dancers and Tantric sex. So he went back to acting his socks off in a wide-ranging career, the very versatility of which has meant he's always the stalwart and never the star, until now.

He's quick to acknowledge it. "I would love to have been the first one to play Darryl - and my agent was pushing for it - but they needed a greater name than mine to put bums on seats at first. And Ian McShane was a real smarmy devil, if I may say so. Darryl is vulnerable, and I think that was overlooked by the previous two. It's a simple moral fable; to crowd it with complexity clouds the message, thatyou should be careful whatyou wish for - or you just might getit."

Sexier than Sacha Distel when he replaced him in Chicago, he was the only blackface in the film Notting Hill and a co-star of Kevin Spacey in the Almeida production of The Iceman Cometh on both sides of the Atlantic ("that got me back into straight acting"). Originally trained in mime, this Brooklyn-born actor/writer/director/dancer has lived in London since 1973. "New York assaults every sense; London is a gentler environment, though it's trying to assault every sense right now. Why do you guys want to go in that direction?" he grumbles good-naturedly.

Yet there's still enough of the Big Apple attitude in him to revel in the "horny devil" first created on screen by Jack Nicholson and then by McShane on stage. To get into the groove,Peters has just been to see The Vagina Monologues with his wife Penny. "Oh man," he says, laughing, "that was a Darryl show."

Peters himself claims to have "millions" of female friends ("sister-brothers") who always send him flowers for his birthday. "One of my sister-brothers said she had never seen a man receive so many flowers who wasn't gay. It was the greatest compliment; I love women. I fantasise about a bevy of women every night, but I'm only acting. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm in The Witches of Eastwick, not the Darryl Van Horne Show," he drawls, draping his willowy dancer's body across two stalls seats as he gets ready for his close-up. "Man, I'm too damn vain to carry any spare weight. For a cat of my age [he's 49], I'm doing pretty well."

So now he's preparing as only he knows how. "I have to be careful not to indulge in any way before going on stage, otherwise it would take my chi - my energy, my life-force - away from me. Although I have practised Tantric sex, which can go on for hours.It's a mental thing." He pauses and smiles. "Orgasms are all in the mind." As that master-manipulator Darryl Van Horne should know.

The Witches Of Eastwick