For this week’s edition of Celebrating The Living, Mr. C.M. Crockford will be filling in for Gillianren. Without further ado, here’s a look at Bernadette Peters from C.M. Crockford!

I was going to cover Audra MacDonald for this but truth be told I just don’t know enough of her work beyond her (magnificent) singing. Bernadette Peters on the other hand I practically grew up with, from The Jerk to Into The Woods, her emotive, swinging voice always a great delight for me. She can do pretty much anything: singing, comedy, drama, sometimes all at once, and has been well recognized for it – nine Drama Desk nominations, hot damn.

There’s a lot to talk about with her, whether it’s her work in TV, film, and most importantly the theater as one of the great Diva actresses. She appears on Mozart in the Jungle (a show unseen by this writer) right now and has acted steadily for decades, including her lovely balancing act against Steve Martin in the messed up comedy classic The Jerk – the famous scene where they sing “Tonight You Belong To Me” together is funny but unexpectedly sweet and sincere in a way that has a glimmer of magic to it. I distinctly remember her as the Stepmother in the ABC Brandy version of Cinderella as well, her number “I Fell In Love With Love” being the perfect mix of over the top and spiteful.

Which has always been one of Peters’ gifts onstage, the ability to be louder and sillier than everyone else next to her or onscreen and never lose control either. And of course…that voice. Peters has one of my favorite Broadway voices, a husky, clipped soprano who’s able to cut through everything surrounding her to beam an ecstatic emotion through to whoever’s listening or watching. She’s perfect for Sondheim exactly because she has the diction to handle his brisk, virtuoso lyrics and the wide range of feeling for his preference for “actors who can sing”. Look at how she sings “Losing My Mind” at the Olivier Awards, her vocals deliberately strained, wishy washy, like she’s being beaten down by the raw need of her character.

I’ll leave you with the performance of “Stay With Me”, with Peters as the Witch in the original Broadway production of Into The Woods. The Witch sings this song to her surrogate daughter Rapunzel, who is rebellious and wants to leave her tower, but the Witch begs her to stay, frightened of what would happen in the greater world to her daughter. Like so much of Sondheim’s songs, the emotions here range from rage to heartbreak to a beautiful, pained vulnerability, and Peters nails down every single feeling, her vibrato soaring then falling back when she needs to show who the Witch is: a parent, terrified of losing the only person she really loves. Peters is in short the master, whether in voice or performance, of going big then stripping back her affect, showing who her character really is underneath the layers.