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 Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 3/31/2014 at 7:42:32 AM ET
Here is an interview in TimeOut Sydney, updated as of March 27, 2014.
I am sad to say that Stella has died.
Time Out Interview
"Q:You've long been an animal lover – and a dog lover particularly – having started the annual Broadway Barks event with Mary Tyler Moore to help get shelter animals adopted. How many dogs do you have now?
A:Right now I just have the one dog – I usually have two but I lost my 16-year-old girl, my pitbull, on October 31. I had to let her go. Now I have Charlie. I got him because I'd lost another dog before the girl and she was grieving so much. She pushed his mat up against the front door and waited for him to come home. For weeks she slept out there; I'd wake up at 5am and she was crying looking at his bed – isn't it heartbreaking? So I went looking for a shaggy young male and I found Charlie – in Texas actually –brought him back and she was content again.
Q:Is it hard to leave Charlie behind when you tour?
A:It's hard, I don't like doing it – someone does stay with him and in the daytime he goes to camp. But he gives me a big talking-to when I get back. He barks at me and he howls like, "Ow-ooooooo, you've been gone too long, don't do that again."
| Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 3/31/2014 at 7:46:32 AM ET
Here is another interview, with the Sydney Morning Herald, dated December 21, 2013.
Sydney Morning Herald interview
| Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 4/3/2014 at 8:21:29 AM ET
Review from Sydney Morning Herald:
Review, Sydney
"Perhaps it is a matter of personality as much as voice: a natural warmth and an instinct for never exaggerating the emotional content of a song. Whatever the case, it is easy to see and hear why, for 30 years, Bernadette Peters has probably been musical theatre's finest performer.
This is an accolade she may carry for some time to come, too, given that the female leads to emerge in her wake nearly all tend to shriek. If the Peters way of singing is now considered old-fashioned, let's turn back the clock.
Equally obvious was why she has been the pre-eminent interpreter of the work of Stephen Sondheim, the last half-century's most important writer of musicals. A wisp of huskiness lends her already girlish voice a naivety that perfectly complements Sondheim's knowing lyrics and even more knowing music. At a stroke she dilates meanings and has fresh implications flaring from every line.
She even breathed new life into Send In the Clowns, which she performed in Sondheim's A Little Night Music on Broadway in 2010. Rather than make it emotionally swollen (as so many do), Peters contracted it, delicately squeezing out its essence like toothpaste from a near-empty tube.
Across the night she seldom deployed the considerable power still at her disposal as she fronted an 11-piece orchestra expertly directed by her long-term accompanist Marvin Laird, preferring to make her high notes diaphanous, as on No One Is Alone from Into the Woods.
Her buoyant, charming sense of humour not only underscored a Sondheim number like You Could Drive A Person Crazy (from Company), but also fizzed during There Is Nothing Like a Dame (South Pacific) and a funny/sexy Fever.
The secret that makes Peters so good also makes her sound half her age."
|  leebee
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Registered:
1/19/2004
Fav. BP Song: Being Alive
Fav. BP Show: Sunday In The Park With George
| posted: 4/3/2014 at 5:59:22 PM ET
Judging from the reviews she's getting, Bernadette may become the actual Queen of Australia in another week. I am very sorry to hear about Stella. I have two rescue pitbulls myself and they are a wonderful part of life.
| Scottie
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3/6/2006
From:
Edinburgh, Scotland | posted: 4/5/2014 at 4:46:37 AM ET
Another Australian review...
The Australian
| Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 4/6/2014 at 2:25:24 PM ET
Article in Melbourne "The Age", April 7:
The Age Melbourne article, April 7
"The interesting thing about Peters in performance, however, is how much she swerves away from stereotype. For someone who endured and was shaped by a passionate and ambitious stage mother, the performance as Mama Rose was light years away from the blustering Ethel Merman image. Ben Brantley in the New York Times said in Sam Mendes' production she ''worked against type and expectation'' in order to create ''the most complex and compelling portrait''.
Her relationship to the idea of the musical comedy star seems to be a bit like Sondheim's relationship to his mentors Oscar Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein. This was accentuated in 2010 when Peters took over the role of Desiree in A Little Night Music - the most traditional and sumptuous of Sondheim's musicals, adapted from Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer's Night - from Catherine Zeta-Jones in Trevor Nunn's Broadway production. Sondheim once sat down at a piano in Melbourne and announced, ''I will now play a medley of my most popular tunes,'' and proceeded to play Send in the Clowns.
When Peters, with her intense actor-singer instincts, went at the song - in the role that has been famously played by actresses from Judi Dench to Sigrid Thornton - her first thought was to get the music right. She and Sondheim settled on a lower key so, in Peters' words, ''the song shouldn't be too singy''. It was as if she penetrated the heart of the music by stripping it back to its nearly lame actor-like minimalism (which, oddly enough, makes it the one golden Sondheim tune).
But if all this sounds straightforward, even obvious, the critical response wasn't.
Charles Isherwood, in the New York Times, described it as an occasion ''of transporting artistry … an indelible moment in the history of musical theatre''. Instead of getting a born actress fumbling her way into music we got one of nature's singers pulling herself back into something on the verge of Sprechgesang.
It will be fascinating to see this legend in concert. She'll no doubt be singing old favourites. But she is, of course, an enigma. Almost a female Dorian Gray. This woman who looks 37 and whom you imagine is 45, was actually born in 1947. Somehow it's as if the precocity of that ancient childhood trouping and touring has preserved forever the dreamy beauty of some eternal youth that glides like a ghost from generation to generation."
[NOTE: Year of birth is incorrect...]
| Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 4/9/2014 at 7:40:25 AM ET
There is a review on broadwayworld.com (I can't access that site, old computer, altho I may try later from my IPAD):
"Bernadette Peters is a music theatre icon unsurpassed by many, if any. Even if you've haven't seen her craft on display, she is bound to be on..."
| Jean
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6/7/2003 | posted: 4/9/2014 at 8:40:00 AM ET
One more review, from Melbourne:
Melbourne review
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