There's no song business like Bernadette's sultry business

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.

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 t

Courtesy of The Washington Post Bernadette Peters is still shootin' strong.

heater 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" opened Thursday night.

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 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. Bernadette is flawless as far as I'm concerned."

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. 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.

"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," 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. 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 had some magical moments, particularly when she delivered the beautiful and touching "Children Will Listen." It's become one of her standards.

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."

When asked whether there is any show of the last 30 years that she wishes she'd gotten a crack at, Peters gives 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 gotta 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, 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."

01-11-99