Stages : Warming Up for a Nine-City Summer

Rehearsal time, folks. Eleven floors up in the Nola Studios in midtown Manhattan, Bernadette Peters and Peter Allen face a mirror, tap dancing to the Irving Berlin song “I Love a Piano.”

It’s a hot, sweltering day. The faint breeze pushing through the open windows offers only slight relief from the muggy summer heat.

Yet in the best trouper tradition, Peters and Allen--she in a red top and baggy pants, he in a gray T-shirt and walking shorts--give the illusion that this is a whole bunch of fun. They smile through the sweat, even on the third run-through.

This and a subsequent full-orchestra rehearsal, photographers invited, constitute the beginning of what will be a much-song, some-dance tour, a mix of old standards, Allen tunes and a dab of Stephen Sondheim.

Why the tour?

“Why not? I always wanted to work with Peter,” says Peters, whose Betty Boop speaking voice has gotten her a wide range of film comedy roles that tend to make one forget she can belt out songs with the best of them.

“We did the Oscar show a few years ago, and we have the same agent,” says Allen. “We’d been talking about doing a benefit together. . . .”

“And we never were available at the same time,” Peters says, picking up the sentence. “But things changed, and I wanted to do some work this summer, touring, and Peter did, and. . . .”

And now they have a nine-city tour that starts Thursday at the South Shore Music Circus in Cohassett, Mass. It includes a July 28 stop at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and concludes with an Aug. 24-Sept. 6 stand at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

Then on to Broadway?

“Don’t say that,” Allen says, with a look of mock alarm. “It worries me. But it’s fun going out with Bernadette.”

Allen’s unease about Broadway has to do with the late “Legs Diamond,” his second musical since 1970, when he made his Broadway debut in a post-”Hair” rock musical “Soon.”

Despite a cast that included such diverse folk as Nell Carter and Richard Gere, “Soon” died soon after opening night. Like the next night.

“Legs Diamond,” a $5.3-million epic in glitter for which Allen wrote the music, fared somewhat better, though pummelled by critics on its Dec. 26 debut last year. It closed Feb. 19 from what a spokeswoman called “insufficient business.”

Allen says religion played a key part: The Nederlander chain, owner of the Mark Hellinger Theater, leased the home of “Legs” to a religious group.

He doesn’t know if the show would have survived, anyway. But the reviews didn’t help. Unlike the worlds of books and film, he says, theater “is the only art form where critics actually kill.”

Maybe so. But in March, film carpers, if they didn’t kill, at least severely wounded Peters’ “Slaves of New York,” the much-ballyhooed adaptation of Tama Janowitz’s fictional accounts of being young and hip in Manhattan.

Peters has heard cheers on Broadway for her work in Jerry Herman’s “Mack and Mabel” and Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods.” Thrice nominated for a Tony, she won New York theater’s top honor in 1986 in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance.”

All this may have helped enable her to survive the boos for the quickly departed “Slaves,” in which she essayed a designer of hip hats. At least she is philosophical about it, and also, by extension, the recent “Pink Cadillac” that she made with Clint Eastwood, a film that also displeased the critics.

“Aw, you do a movie and you hope for the best,” she says. “High hopes? No. You never know what’s going to happen out there. You never do. . . . You hope it’s going to be well-received. But you never know.”

Peters and Allen--whose pre-tour schedules this month had them doing their respective solo club acts on two consecutive weekends in Atlantic City--have been in show business since their tender years.

Peters, who made “The Jerk” and “Pennies From Heaven” with Steve Martin when the two were going steady, started her career at age 4. It was a humble debut--a TV show, “Juvenile Jury.” Her profit from that was a Benrus watch that she still owns and a typewriter that still is in her family’s home in Ozone Park, in the New York borough of Queens.

But her audience was a lot larger than attended the performing debut of Allen, who shared an Oscar in 1981 as co-composer of the hit “Arthur’s Theme,” and whose other composing credits include the 1978 hit “Don’t Cry Out Loud.” He broke in at 9 “out in the bush” in his hometown of Tenterfield in eastern Australia. He sang songs in a local pub “for 30 shillings a night on Saturday nights.”

Allen, a composer of generally romantic, sometimes sardonic songs and a performer noted for his campy, come-to-the-cabaret glitz and flash, lives light-years from all that. Home for him is near San Diego in a house overlooking the Pacific.

“I don’t know,” he says when asked about San Diego. “It reminds me of Australia.” His situation, he says, is not like that of the actor Mel Gibson, who makes a picture in Hollywood, then returns home to Australia to relax and smell the flowers for a couple of months.

“For someone like me, if I don’t have my butt out on stage, I’m not earning money. So. . . .”