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BERNADETTE PETERS
EVEN BETTER THAN BETTY BOOP

How many Americans in their 50s could get away with hopping up onto a grand piano and stretching out like an odalisque? Bernadette Peters can, and she’s unbeatable at it. That was one reason Symphony Hall was packed for her Bank of America Celebrity Series debut recital Sunday afternoon.

Most of the time, though, she was vertical and in constant motion. No complaints there, either. Not only is Peters great at occupying the kind of beady, slinky, glittery dress that has a slit up the front and not the side, she’s great at stalking around the stage in the thing and practically making it sing along with her.

From a lesser creature, such hyped-up sexuality could be frightening and/or ludicrous. Peters defuses that with a hoydenish innocence one would dearly like to believe in — that pout and those cascading frizzy ringlets are there for a reason — and a sense of self-parody that sometimes brings to mind Marilyn Monroe’s wickedly awful chantoozie act in Bus Stop.

And oh yes, she did sing. Peters’s voice was — need it be said? — sweet and cute, but with a knowing, dangerous, urban edge. Betty Boop, by comparison, comes out sounding like a Girl Scout. And the æsthetic is one that seems to welcome the rather nasty edge that amplification, relentlessly laid on, will always add. Sunday afternoon that amplification got louder and louder. The "big" numbers suffered most, especially when Peters was taking on Stephen Sondheim in his in-your-face sensitivity-training mode. She was always in control, of course, but you could hear the physical resources being stretched.

All in all, though, it made for a lovely stroll down Memory Lane, Tin Pan Alley, the Great White Way, and points beyond. Marvin Laird’s classy orchestra — half big band, half Broadway pit orchestra — played no small part. If the point was that the older the song the better, it certainly got made. "The Gentleman Is a Dope," "Some Enchanted Evening," "My Romance," "When I Marry Mr. Snow" — marvelous stuff. Did Peters fuss with some of this, over-elaborating, micro-interpreting, and substituting exegesis for singing? Yes, she did. One wishes she wouldn’t. But that’s probably because she knows too much. Some problem.

BY RICHARD BUELL

Issue Date: April 8 - 14, 2005
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