| Author | Message: Extremely LONG article from Washington Post | Posted by: Eric
On: 1/3/1999 at 10:32:03 AM GMT
Message #: 490
See headers | At Home in Her Range
At 50, Bernadette Peters Is Still 'Gun'-Ho About Musicals
By Chip Crews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 3, 1999; Page G01
NEW YORK—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.
She's clad all in black, the knitted top squared off at the north end
of her notable bosom. 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, reconceived 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. She'll test her spurs at the Kennedy Center in Washington,
where "Annie" is now in previews and will open Thursday.
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 -- in a
production that was referred to, behind her back, as "Granny Get Your
Gun." 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
projects -- the thing that reduces audiences to lovesick submission --
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's Frank Rich 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. I can't think of anything negative."
Heady praise, which helps explain the considerable notice that "Annie
Get Your Gun" is attracting as it makes its way to Broadway. Then,
too, there's the show itself, which might be described as a classic of
its kind.
Coming as it did in the wake of "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel," "Annie"
suffered some critical sniping for being old-fashioned even in its
original 1946 production. ("Yes," said Irving Berlin, who'd written
his greatest score for the show. "An old-fashioned smash.") For the
new version, the producers have further adorned its pedigree by
engaging Peter Stone ("1776," "The Will Rogers Follies," "Titanic") to
create a new book.
Stone has devised a show-within-a-show concept in which members of
Buffalo Bill's Wild West company "present" Annie's story. Some song
placements have been altered, and a romantic subplot, dropped from the
1966 revival, has been restored.
As evidence of the show's promise, Stone recalls watching a rehearsal
with Berlin's progeny. Any number of talented performers have
undertaken the part of Annie -- Mary Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Betty
Hutton in the movie -- but, he reports, "the Berlin daughters said to
me, 'We're finally seeing it played right.' "
Reynolds did the show in California about 20 years ago, and the testy
Merman, then nearing 70, reputedly sent her a wire that said, simply,
"HOW DARE YOU?"
Peters has never heard that story, and she seems genuinely shocked.
"You're kidding -- really?" she says. "Oh my God."
She knew Merman slightly. Perhaps the great Ethel would have been more
lenient with her.
"What do I think she'd say to me?" she says, laughing. "I guess she'd
say, 'How dare you?' I mean, if that's her attitude."
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 Ozone Park,
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.
Her mom was always encouraging but, Peters insists, not the
stereotypical stage mother. "I wouldn't let her be," she says. "We had
a deal that I could quit any time I wanted to."
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 -- he drove a bread truck -- and she chose her new name
in his honor.
Peters worked off and on through her childhood. In 1957, Otto
Preminger cast her in the play "This Is Goggle," which, she's pretty
sure, played Washington. 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."
During the '60s, she underwent a typical young person's struggle for
self-acceptance. The issues can be more pointed for a performer.
"After trying to be normal, normal, normal, fit in, fit in, fit in,
that type of thing, I had to learn that it's okay to be yourself."
She's laughing now, her hands up to her face. "And to be an original."
Which she is.
"Yeah," she says matter-of-factly. "But I had to stop trying to fit in
and just be myself. When I grew up in the '60s, your hair had to be
straight and you had to be skinny and have no boobs, and it was like
not my era."
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. This one played the Kennedy Center
on its way to Broadway.
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. Even with Preston on hand, the show folded after 66
performances.
It would be 10 years before Peters was seen again on a Broadway stage.
There was a time when stars were very often the starting point for
Broadway songwriters and librettists. "The King and I," "Peter Pan"
and "Annie Get Your Gun" might not exist today had Gertrude Lawrence,
Mary Martin and Merman not inspired them.
When they weren't doing classics, these ladies and their kind did
journeyman vehicles -- some of them extremely successful -- that had
been perhaps even more carefully tailored to their talents. Cole
Porter, who wrote five shows for Merman, analyzed her voice and
decided what her three strongest notes were. Key words in her lyrics
always fell on one of those notes.
Then, too, the roles they played -- variations on the elegant charmer,
wholesome tomboy, brassy dame -- were created to present these stars
to best advantage.
Such tailoring still happens once in a while, but by the time Peters
came along in the late '60s, the practice was in steep decline. The
story, the overall evening, came first. Stars were still cast, of
course, but increasingly their role was to serve the material.
The result was a reordering of the theatrical hierarchy. Angela
Lansbury was magnificent in "Sweeney Todd," and Sondheim and director
Hal Prince will tell you how lucky they were to have her -- but you
can bet that if she'd been wrong for the part, they'd have hired
someone else. Once upon a time the show might have been altered on her
behalf.
"We don't have stars today," says Sondheim, "because they don't do
enough shows to build up a public following. Joan Crawford didn't
become a star overnight. . . . Nor did Ethel Merman. You have to be
groomed for that."
After the failure of "Mack and Mabel," Peters decamped for California.
She says she wasn't discouraged, and indeed she'd been in the process
of moving west when the show came along in the first place.
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.
So she kept busy. But pretend there was a performer in, say, 1934 who
made a Broadway splash comparable to the one Peters made in "Mack and
Mabel" 40 years later. Without question, somebody great -- the
Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, or maybe all of them --
would have been vying for her services onstage the very next season.
And yet what was there for Bernadette Peters in the musical theater of
1975? She was too young and too soft for "Chicago," out of the
question for the Kabuki-style "Pacific Overtures" -- and you can bet
the producers of "A Chorus Line" didn't want a major Broadway star in
their cast. Looking back on this day, she says she still believes
Hollywood was the right decision.
"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's radiant performance captivated both critics and the public.
She followed that up the next year with Andrew Lloyd Webber's
unconventional "Song and Dance," in which she was alone onstage
throughout Act 1 in the role of a young Englishwoman who moves to New
York and undergoes various romantic traumas. Her part was told
entirely in music, and even Lloyd Webber's detractors note reluctantly
that such numbers as "Unexpected Song" and "Tell Me on a Sunday" are
lovely. Though the show didn't thrill critics, it ran, and she took
the Tony Award.
"Song and Dance" presented an onerous workload -- "an adventure that
I'd go through every night," she calls it. "People would say, 'How
many songs do you sing in the show?' " she recalls. "I don't know. I
don't count them. I'd rather just go out and do it." She laughs. "Try
to do it."
Sondheim and Lapine's "Into the Woods," an exploration of fairy tales,
brought her back in 1987 in the role of the Witch. She got top
billing, but it wasn't the lead. Still, she had some magical moments,
particularly when she delivered the beautiful and touching "Children
Will Listen." It's become one of her standards.
Peters had no problem with the size of her part -- in fact, she asked
to be cast. "I thought, 'Well, in England you do ensemble pieces,' "
she says. "You play the lead in one show, and in the next show you
play something else. And also because I learned so much about life
doing 'Sunday in the Park' that I just wanted that experience again."
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, 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 organically -- in the writing -- "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."
Throughout most of the movies' sound era, there have been complaints
that the medium didn't make good use of the great musical theater
stars. Merman, Martin, Carol Channing, Bert Lahr and others all had,
at best, fitful screen lives -- but there was always the stage. In
Bernadette Peters's case, never mind Hollywood: For great stretches of
her 30-year career, Broadway hasn't known what to do with her.
Here, perhaps, is a key:
The question is whether there is any show of the last 30 years that
she wishes she'd gotten a crack at, and as with every other query,
she's giving it her best. There's another of those small ummmmmmms,
and the face scrunches just a bit as it comes to rest on her palm.
Suddenly she brightens. "I'll tell you what I'm really glad I got to
do," she says helpfully. "My concerts."
They've been mightily successful, those concerts -- "Sondheim, etc.,"
a widely acclaimed Carnegie Hall benefit, is preserved on CD, and a
taped London reprise will air on PBS next spring. And she has said
they're now her favorite projects. Of course, she hasn't really
answered the question. But this appears to be the way her mind works.
She can't control what shows she's offered or the size of her roles or
the impressions of people who go to see them. And most especially, the
fact that if she'd been born 30 or 40 years earlier she'd probably
have been a rather busier Broadway baby. If it's out of her control,
she tries not to worry about it.
"My years in the theater, the successful years," she muses, slipping
into the past tense, "ended up being 'Sunday in the Park,' 'Song and
Dance,' 'Into the Woods' -- I didn't have a successful show until
then." She breaks into laughter. "I thought every show closed!"
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. Though she speaks of
no heroes, clearly there are 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. It's enough to give a performer hope.
"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."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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"Let the crisis become a bridge...and cross that bridge tomorrow..."
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I could almost live without you...
But not quite"
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