Through the Years with Bernadette Peters

When Bernadette Peters first appeared with the Boston Pops under John Williams in 1991, she sang Stephen Sondheim's "Broadway Baby" – a title that neatly describes this incandescent star. She was not quite born in a trunk, having started performing at the age of 3 thanks to her stage mother who kept her child busy in a number of early television quiz shows throughout the 1950s such as "The Horn and Hardart Children's Hour" and "Juvenile Jury." At 9 she received her Equity card appearing in a flopola play called "This is Goggle" that closed out-of-town. Years later she would remember her first quote from a reviewer covering that show: "She has a rear end like a Bartlett pear, and she comes on stage like a grade school Diamond Lil," a reference to Mae West, to whom she was sometimes compared as an adult.

At 15 she toured in the second national company of "Gypsy." That was 1963. Some 40 years later she would helm that musical's fourth Broadway revival and receive her seventh Tony nomination for a performance. She won the Best Actress in a Musical Tony twice – for "Song and Dance" (1986) and the 1999 revival of "Annie Get Your Gun," again repeating a role made famous by Ethel Merman. She was also honored with the prestigious Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award in 2012, in part for her philanthropic work with Broadway Barks, the organization she founded 25 years ago with her friend Mary Tyler Moore to promote rescue dog adoptions. And Peters could conceivably receive another nomination this season when she returns to Broadway this Spring with "Old Friends," a celebration of Sondheim's career she starred in last year in London.

Theater, film, and television are mediums that Peters has excelled in, but what could be the best showcase for her multi-faceted talents is the concert stage, where the actress/singer makes a deep, often electric connection with her audience; and not through histrionics, but the care she gives each lyric, especially those of Sondheim. There was a debate back in the day as to how Sondheim preferred actors who sing to those that put the voice first; but with Peters there is no such concern. He put it this way: "Like very few others, she sings and acts at the same time. Most performers act and then sing, act and then sing ... Bernadette is flawless as far as I'm concerned. I can't think of anything negative."