Broadway’s Bernadette Peters: Viva the Diva, Her Fans Say

Bernadette Peters arrives alone at the chrome-fancy restaurant bar, her 5-foot-2 presence announced by the familiar bouquet of ringlets atop her head. Her expectant smile brightens considerably at the sight of a friend who’s showed up to surprise her.

Nothing in her manner suggests she’s somebody special, but here on this island and in various other outposts of the civilized world, she is just that: perhaps the theater’s most gifted diva of the last quarter-century. Her voice can thrill you, envelop you and break your heart, sometimes in the space of a single song, and the very mention of her credits--a variable lot highlighted by “Sunday in the Park With George,” “Song and Dance” and “Into the Woods”--can quicken the pulse of almost any theater lover.

She’s just back from Staten Island, of all places, where she spent the afternoon posing with a horse for Vanity Fair.

A horse?

Of course. After an absence of five years, Peters is returning to the theater with a full-scale, re-conceived revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” that is generating a good bit of buzz here and elsewhere. After all, the star musical, a time-honored genre on Broadway, has become something of a rarity in this era of ensemble megashows.

True, there has been minor carping that at 50, Peters is a little, well, senior for the part of the brazen young Annie Oakley. But not too much carping. After all, the show’s original star, Ethel Merman, revived it successfully when she was eight years older. And if she lives to be 100, Peters will never be as old as Merman was at 58.

Playwright Arthur Laurents has observed that the quality Peters has is “experienced innocence.” She can be sexy or sultry or coy, but she’s never vulgar--and never false. In person, too, she seems the wise child, and the smooth white skin and fetching underbite do nothing to dispel the notion.

Ask her about the roles she’s played and she casts her eyes skyward and purses her lips around a large, pensive “ummmmmm” before speaking about them. (Although she’s unfailingly cooperative, there’s a sense that she’d rather be working than talking about it.)

The youthful image comes up in any discussion of her, whether it’s besotted fans or critics, who have displayed a monotonous tendency over the years to compare her with a kewpie doll. Still, by age 50, isn’t that flattering?

“There’s nothing I can do, reading about it, about what people’s perceptions are,” Peters says pleasantly. “There are other things about me besides looking kewpie-dollish.” She thinks about it. “I’d like people to see me as a woman now, but it depends on the role you’re playing.”

Thirteen years ago, the New York Times wrote of her: “As an actress, singer, comedienne and all-around warming presence, she has no peer in the musical theater right now.” Her colleagues are no less effusive.

“She’s my fave--I adore her,” says James Lapine, who directed and wrote the books for “Sunday” and “Into the Woods.” “She’s a loving, generous person, and I think it comes through in her performances as well.”

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the scores for those shows, concurs. “Like very few others, she sings and acts at the same time,” he says. “Most performers act and then sing, act and then sing. . . . Bernadette is flawless as far as I’m concerned.”

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Bernadette Lazzara can be said to have begun her career at 3 1/2, when her mother, Marguerite, observed the youngest of her three children performing in front of the family television set in Queens. Marguerite had come over from Italy and harbored show-biz dreams that she quickly transferred to her offspring. Soon enough, baby Bernadette was showing up on the small screen.

Peters insists hers wasn’t the stereotypical stage mother. “We had a deal that I could quit any time I wanted to,” she says.

It was her mother’s idea that she change her name, the stated reason being that Lazzara was too long for marquees, but Bernadette wasn’t fooled. “She was afraid I’d be stereotyped,” she says. Her father’s name is Peter, and she chose her new name in his honor.

In 1957, Otto Preminger cast Peters in the play “This Is Goggle.” Four years later, she was a kiddie vaudevillian in a touring company of “Gypsy.”

She says that from the start, “I knew something was going to happen for me. I wasn’t sure what or how.”

Peters made her Broadway debut in “Johnny No Trump,” a straight play that opened and closed the same night in 1967. By season’s end, she had landed a part in “George M!” with Joel Grey. Then came the off-Broadway “Dames at Sea”--her first true hit--and she was on her way.

She got a lot of jobs, but most of her early shows were unsuccessful. Probably her best moments came in “Mack and Mabel” (1974), in which she portrayed the drug-addicted silent film star Mabel Normand opposite the great Robert Preston.

The show contains what may be Jerry Herman’s finest score, and he handed Peters an instant classic in “Time Heals Everything.” Overnight, the New York Times hailed her as “a major Broadway star.” She was 26.

But a strong score and fine performances couldn’t counteract the otherwise lousy reviews and downbeat story, in which Normand dies of an overdose. The show folded after 66 performances.

It would be 10 years before Peters was seen again on a Broadway stage.

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After “Mack and Mabel,” Peters decamped for California. In Hollywood, she took on an unsuccessful TV series, “All’s Fair,” with Richard Crenna, appeared frequently on “The Carol Burnett Show” and gained a minor toehold in the movies. Among her pictures were “W.C. Fields and Me” (1976), “Silent Movie” (1976), “The Jerk” (1979) and “Pennies From Heaven” (1981), the last two with her then-boyfriend, Steve Martin.

“I think those were the dark years of New York and of theater,” she says. “I think those were the years when there weren’t a lot of shows being done. . . . I figured I had to go to L.A. to make more of a name for myself.”

When she finally did return to Broadway in 1984, it was in perhaps her greatest role: Dot, the mistress of Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) in the dazzling “Sunday in the Park.” The show won the Pulitzer Prize, and Peters’ radiant performance captivated both critics and the public.

She followed that up the next year with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s unconventional “Song and Dance,” then with Sondheim and Lapine’s “Into the Woods.”

The past decade has brought such feature films as “Slaves of New York,” Lapine’s “Impromptu” and the upcoming “Snow Days,” a number of TV movies, a few well-received CDs and numerous sold-out concerts. And all of one Broadway show: a so-so adaptation of “The Goodbye Girl,” which lasted a few months in the 1992-93 season on the strength of her name and co-star Martin Short’s.

She was good in it, but “The Goodbye Girl” belonged to Short. Doesn’t a diva deserve better?

“Marty made it such a joy to do that show, and I loved doing it,” she says. “Getting to know him . . . he was a great joy.” Now she lapses into the general. “You sometimes get frustrated that the show isn’t working as well as you had hoped it would. . . . Sometimes the elements work, and sometimes they’re not going to.”

Fifty-year-old voices might be expected to be a little on the downward slide. But Sondheim, with whom one doesn’t argue, says, “I think her voice is getting better as she gets older.” And from the evidence, he’s right. On recent recordings, her high notes have grown surer, the sound more supple overall.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Peters has done so little theater lately. Why couldn’t this woman get a job?

Lapine puts it best: “What role can you think of that she might have played that’s been on the boards?” he asks. “There are just not musicals that are star-driven. . . . And I don’t think Bernadette wanted to do just anything.”

She’ll play Annie for “a year, if all goes well,” she says. If not, there are other shows, as well as the concert stage.

The discussion turns again to her voice and the strange and wonderful changes that are taking place in it. Peters acknowledges all that but seems more comfortable discussing other singers, women who are lighting the way for her.

“Lena Horne was doing her concert at 65,” she points out. And then there’s the “amazing” Barbara Cook, who recently made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall at 71.

“I mean, my voice may lose some of its luster,” Peters says, sounding not terribly disturbed at the prospect. “But look: What I can look forward to, you know? Hopefully, I can keep on singing.”