ACTRESS-SINGER MAKES IT A POINT TO TAKE JOY IN HER WORK AND HER CAUSES, INCLUDING AN ANIMAL CHARITY THAT SHE WILL TOUT WITH THE BPO ON SATURDAY
The Bernadette Peters principle
One Sunday morning, when Bernadette Peters was a little kid in Queens, her parents left the house and she did something forbidden. Her mother had a stack of records. “They were those thick albums. Breakable. You weren’t supposed to touch them,” Peters says.
Unsupervised, Bernadette selected an album whose cover intrigued her. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel.”
“The Carousel Waltz came on,” she says. “That was my first introduction to that musical. I still think it’s so amazing.”
So much for people who dismiss Rodgers and Hammerstein as corny. Peters, who promises to sing her unique rendition of “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” on Saturday when she opens the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s pops season, disagrees.
“If they take a song like ‘If I Loved You,’ it’s not corny,” she points out. “It’s not saying, ‘I love you.’ It’s so not committing.
It’s being iffy. She so doesn’t want to reveal her heart. She’s being careful.
“And ‘What’s the Use of Wonderin’?” She rests her case.
‘I bow at your feet’
Dan Hart, the BPO’s executive director, points out that the upcoming pops season is rich in Broadway, with tributes to Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen.
Peters, Hart acknowledges, is one of Broadway’s great divas. “When you see someone like her, you can see why she made it. There’s no question,” he says. “The special talent, level of artistry –it’s a great way to kick off the season.”
For a two-time Tony Award winner, Peters is very un-diva-like. She is famous for being nice to her fans. On the phone, she sounds simply sweet –closer to Dot in “Sunday in the Park with George” than to Mama Rose in “Gypsy.”
“This is Bernadette,” she says, when she calls.
At the moment, Peters is excited about “Broadway Barks,” an animal charity she runs with her friend Mary Tyler Moore. Their mission is to help stray dogs find happy homes. Peters has written a children’s book called “Broadway Barks” –and even a lullaby to go with it, which she plans on singing Saturday.
The lullaby is called “Kramer’s Song,” after her own beloved mutt. It was the first song Peters wrote. She almost didn’t write it. “I said, ‘Who’s going to write the song? I have too much respect for composers.’ ”
Then, in an airplane, she dreamed up “Kramer’s Song.” Since then she has written a second song, “Stella’s Song,” for her second book, about pit bulls. Stella is Peters’ pit bull.
“Pit bulls are wonderful, when they’re rehabilitated,” Peters says. “They don’t want to bite. My dog loves little dogs.”
Peters can say things like that and not sound ridiculous. She has that irresistible warmth.
She seems ageless, even now that she is 60 and a widow (her husband of nine years, an investment adviser, died in a helicopter crash in 2005).
“My first crush!” writes one man, viewing a recent video of Peters on YouTube.
“Holy ——,” a singer chimes in. “That last note, I wanna hit it! Bernadette, I bow at your feet.”
‘Isn’t it rich?’
Peters had no formal vocal training, but she is quick to pass credit on to people she has worked with.
She regards Jerry Herman, who wrote “Mack and Mabel” and “Mame,” as an upbeat presence. But a poignant story concerns “Mack and Mabel,” a show with a score Peters loves, which failed on Broadway.
“When I was in ‘Mack and
Mabel,’ Jerry was always positive, positive, positive,” Peters recalls. “Then there was one day he wasn’t. I’m thinking, ‘This show’s in trouble.’ ”
Peters is most closely associated with Stephen Sondheim, and he inspired her with his notes — gentle critiques he would offer the cast backstage.
“Once he said, ‘I like your passion there, but there’s time. Leave your passions for this phrase,’ “ she says. “Everything was just sharper, when he’d give you his notes.”
Once, Peters consulted Sondheim about the meaning to “Send in the Clowns.”
“I did a special with Bing Crosby, and he had me explain ‘Send in the Clowns’ before he sang it,” she says.
She continues: “In a circus, when an accident happens, they send in the clowns to distract everyone. She decides she wants to be with the father of her child, but he’s with someone else. She wants to be with him, whereas she didn’t in the past, and she made this effort to tell him, and he says, ‘Oh, well, no, no, I’m sorry.’
“So the song is about, isn’t this irony? Isn’t it rich? We’re jerks.”
Do songs ever make Peters cry?
“Oh, sure,” she says. “Even Stephen [Sondheim] asked me in this concert I taped for PBS, in London. He said, ‘What happened? It got very emotional.’
“I said, ‘It’s like I know what country I’m going to, but I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get there.’ You want to surprise yourself.”
