Throughout her extraordinary career, two-time Tony Award-winning actor Bernadette Peters has dazzled audiences and critics with her performances on stage, screen, and in concert. Earlier this year, the petite powerhouse took on one of the most challenging and exciting roles of her career—the starring role in the Broadway revival of Gypsy—and was promptly christened the “beloved eternal daughter of the American musical” by The New York Times critic Ben Brantley. (And he isn’t the only one enamored with Peters—earlier this month she received her third Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical for her stellar performance.)
Following in the footsteps of such legends as Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Tyne Daly—who have played Mama Rose to great acclaim—Peters, says Brantley, “working against type and expectations, has created the complex and compelling portrait of her long career.” With Merman’s performance permanently etched in the minds of veteran theatergoers, Peters has pulled off the previously thought impossible feat of breaking “the Merman mold” completely, enthuses Brantley.
With her porcelain complexion (Peters has always shunned the sun) and signature cascading curls, Peters may seem at first glance to be too pretty and delicate; an unconventional choice for the role of Rose. But this grown-up stage child had a unique perspective on the role. From her earliest days, Peters’ career was shaped by her own ambitious mother, Marguerite. While young Bernadette slept, her mother typed up her daughter’s resume carefully, eliminating the word “understudy” in one particularly prophetic case. (Peters had played one of the Hollywood Blondes in a national company of Gypsy while serving as understudy for the role of Dainty June. She took over for one performance.)
The parallels in Gypsy to Peters’ life, and to her mother’s, are striking. Rose wanted her daughters to escape the dreary life of a working-class existence in Seattle; Marguerite, Peters has said, hoped her daughter’s stardom would release her from the humdrum life of a housewife in Queens. While Rose’s drive comes from her own ill-fated attempts at achieving fame and fortune, Marguerite had her hopes of performing on stage dashed by her own disapproving Sicilian mother.
And, like Rose’s daughters, Peters didn’t want a career on stage at first. “It was my mother’s idea,” she told The New York Times. “It wasn’t like I asked to be in the business! I hated it.”
Peters adored her mother (Marguerite died in 1982), who told her all she had to do was say she wanted to stop performing and she’d call the whole thing off. Peters never did. Mother and daughter came to enjoy life on the road. As a divorcee, Marguerite loved to socialize with the cast and often went gambling after putting Peters and her sister, Donna, to bed.
Fast forward to this season. While basking in the initial glow of the fabulous reviews Peters garnered for Gypsy, she was felled by a persistent respiratory infection that caused her to miss several performances. An avalanche of press coverage about the performer’s future in the show. Judy Katz, a spokeswoman for Peters, insists that she’s fine now; and the show is going on with the Broadway vet.
It seems unlikely that a bothersome illness can keep this incredibly determined and energetic performer away from the role she was made for. Born Bernadette Lazzara, Peters was five years old when she started her career on Horn and Hardart’s kiddie talent show on radio. By the time she was 11, she was appearing on Broadway in The Most Happy Fella. Still in her teens, she appeared in The Penny Friend and performed in the national touring company of Gypsy. She achieved national fame in 1968 with her campy performance as Ruby, a chorus girl in the off-Broadway musical Dames at Sea. In the hands of a less capable actor, the role might have led to typecasting as a ditzy blonde; but Peters broke through in 1969, when she appeared in George M. as Josie Cohan opposite Joel Gray. The same year, she received a Drama Desk Award (for her performance in Dames at Sea – momma Marguerite sewed some of her costumes), and quickly became one of the most popular stars in musical theater.
