Conflict With Broadway Role : Actress Peters Cancels Arts Center Date

Actress-singer Bernadette Peters is withdrawing as the headline performer at an Oct. 3 concert celebrating the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s one-year anniversary so she can take a leading role in a new Broadway musical, Center officials announced Friday.

Peters told the Center earlier this week that the Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods,” which starts previews at New York’s Martin Beck Theater on Sept. 29, is forcing the cancellation.

The Center’s program for the “Encore” concert is still scheduled to include New York City Ballet principal dancers Heather Watts and Jock Soto and a premiere performance of an original musical work by the New American Orchestra, Center President Thomas R. Kendrick said.

Priority tickets for the benefit, which will include a backstage party, are priced at $500. Proceeds will go toward offsetting the Center’s projected first-year operating deficit of $4.1 million.

The Center will soon announce a replacement for Peters, Kendrick said. “We are sorry to lose Bernadette Peters, but we understand the situation,” Kendrick said in a prepared statement.

“She is, after all, one of the leading figures of the American musical theater, and we are happy that she has this exciting new opportunity.”

In “Into the Woods,” which officially opens Oct. 29, Peters will play the Witch, one of five leading roles in a show that includes some of the most familiar characters from Brothers Grimm stories.

The musical, by Sondheim in collaboration with James Lapine (the same team that produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park With George” in 1984) had a trial run last September at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater.