September 21–28, 2000

critic pick|theater

Bernadette Peters

She’s been starring in the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun until this month. Now Bernadette Peters will embark on a whirlwind work tour starting at the Mann Center, singing hits from her illustrious Broadway and Hollywood career, including a group of the Irving Berlin penned Annie Get Your Gun songs. Then she heads from here to Toronto, where she’ll tape a Hallmark Hall of Fame based on the Prince Charming story. Then she’ll record a CD of Rodgers & Hammerstein songs. Peters hopes to return to Broadway in a new musical during the 2001-2002 season.

The talented Peters has been able to deftly combine overt sex and little-girl innocence in her stage persona. "I have some of each of those sides," she said on the phone last week. "I look sexy, but I try never to be lascivious. That’s the difference. And I always treat the sexiness with a sense of humor."

Did any of the men in her life ever object to her famously-plunging necklines? "My father did. Until he died this year, he always wanted to know what I’d be wearing for my concerts, and I never told him." Her husband? "No. He has a great sense of himself, and that’s necessary if you’re going to be with someone who’s always being recognized. And someone who’s older." She married Michael Wittenberg in 1996 when he was 34 and she was 48. Their first meeting was telling: "I was dressed up, in front of my apartment building, waiting for a date who was late. Michael was on his way to a charity event and was in a tuxedo. So he walked up to me, a stranger, and said: ‘Are you ready to go?’ How’s that for a sense of confidence and a sense of humor?"

—Steve Cohen

Bernadette Peters, Fri., Sept. 22, 8 p.m., Mann Center for the Performing Arts, 52nd and Parkside Ave., 215-893-1999, www.manncenter.org, $20-$47.50