POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Bernadette Peters Gives Life to Familiar Songs

Bernadette Peters knows the difference between the musical theater and the concert stage. Her appearance at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Friday was a richly rewarding example of how a gifted theatrical artist can set aside characterizations and bring new life and vitality to a collection of familiar songs.

Peter’s voice--a superbly colorful instrument that is without peer in the contemporary musical theater--never became the sole focus of the performance. Instead, she used her wide array of emotional and technical vocal gradations purely at the service of the stories implicit in the songs. The result was an impressive array of readings of material ranging from Lyle Lovett and Stephen Sondheim to Harold Arlen and Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Looking slim and lovely, occasionally tossing her long, golden hair in stylized movements reminiscent of dancers on an Egyptian frieze, Peters created spellbinding mini-dramas in each of her numbers. With “When I Marry Mr. Snow” from “Carousel,” she was a proper mixture of coyness and determination. In a pairing of “My Romance” and “The Way You Look Tonight”--tunes that, in lesser hands, might tempt vocal pyrotechnics--Peters underplayed the climaxes, delicately employing dramatic pauses and slight shifts in her phrasing to provide maximum interpretive impact.

Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By” had a torch song sound quite different from its original wistful qualities (in the score of “Merrily We Roll Along”). And a closing medley of Arlen works whet the appetite for more extended Peters renditions of such pieces as “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “The Man That Got Away.”

Peters also appeared at Cerritos on Saturday.