Bernadette Peters

Watch Bernadette Peters sing and notice what she does not do. Most performers in a musical play the scene, then set their feet and deliver the number as a separate event. Peters keeps the person going through every bar, so the song is still the scene and the face is still thinking. Stephen Sondheim named it, and she has repeated his phrase since: "Steve described me as a singing actress. He would say a lot of people act in the show, and then they stop acting when they sing. He noticed I continue to act throughout the song." It is the one thing everyone who writes about her agrees on.

She was a child performer on television and stage in the late 1950s, off-Broadway in Dames at Sea by 1968 and on Broadway the same year. The 1970s brought On the Town and Mack & Mabel, then a run of films, two of them with Steve Martin: Marie in The Jerk (1979), Eileen in Pennies from Heaven (1981), and, without Martin, the scheming Lily St. Regis in Annie (1982). Then she went back to the theatre and has mostly stayed there. She originated Dot in Sunday in the Park with George (1984) opposite Mandy Patinkin and the Witch in Into the Woods (1987), returned to Sondheim for Gypsy (2003), A Little Night Music and Follies, and was still singing him in Old Friends in the West End in 2023.

Film had her for a few years around 1980 and used her mostly to be funny. The voice is small, bright and slightly girlish, with something steadier underneath, and in a comedy that gap is the joke: the doll who turns out to be running things. The one performance of hers we have reviewed is a voice part, Sophie in Anastasia (1997), a cousin in Paris who arrives late and, as we said at the time, enjoys herself. We were glad of her. After an hour of grey St Petersburg and Rasputin, hers was a voice that sounded pleased to be there, and the Paris of cream and gold suited her.

The same qualities have cost her. When she played Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (1999) and Rose in Gypsy (2003), some critics said the parts wanted more toughness than that voice and that figure could carry, and measured her against the women who had played them before. The objection describes the instrument rather than a fault in it. Her strength has never come from volume; it comes from the character refusing to stop when the music starts, and that is a quieter sort of hardness.

On screen, seek out the comedies, and Anastasia if there are children about. The screen holds a small part of what she does. The rest is in a theatre, one song at a time, with the acting still going.