BERNADETTE PETERS

The long-awaited revival of Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun opened last night at the Marquis Theatre, starring the one-and-only Bernadette Peters as Annie Oakley, a role made famous by the legendary Ethel Merman. The star-studded audience included such notables as Danny Aiello, Brooke Astor, Lauren Bacall, Catherine Bach, Sandy Duncan, Ben Gazzara, Barbara Cook, Joel Grey, Merv Griffin, Mary Cleere Haran, Marilu Henner, James Earl Jones, Sharon Lawrence, Cameron Mackintosh, John McDaniel, Mary Tyler Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Gregory Peck, Brooke Shields, Bobby Short, Ann Reinking, William Finn and many others. The audience leapt to its feet for the star of the evening, and I thought you would enjoy reading some of BP's fabulous reviews:

Linda Winter in Newsday:  "Call her the Anti-Merm. Bernadette Peters is daring to Broadway stand up to the blasting, belting echoes of Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, which opened last night in Graciela Daniele's classy, romantic, thoroughly enchanting revival at the Marquis Theatre. And if those seem like awfully delicate words to describe Irving Berlin's raucous Wild West musical of 1946, the composer-lyricist's amazing score reminds us why, every so often, there is no business like show business, indeed. What an unexpectedly lovable idea this has turned out to be. . . The top of Peters' big buckskin-colored, cotton-candy hair comes about up to Wopat's shoulder, a contrast that makes this Annie's effortless marksmanship - markswomanship? -- that much more disarming. Peters, our most underutilized throwback to the era of virtuosic musical-comedy stardom, brings the same rigorous precision, wit and sense of discovery to this chestnut as she has brought to her cherished edgy women of Stephen Sondheim. At the start, her Annie is an untamed cartoon, a ragamuffin in oversized suedes (gloriously comic and glamorous costumes by William Ivey Long). She talks with an alarming accent that sounds as if her tongue is too big for her mouth. Peters, with her period face and modern timing, lets Annie grow up into a woman incapable of throwing away a nothing little line or wasting a gesture. She seems to enjoy the sensation of living in her skin and Peter is generous about sharing her amusement. Then there is the voice, with its combination of simple sweetness and complex irony, not to mention the risky streak that picks an operatic high note out of the air in 'Anything You Can Do' (effectively moved from the first act to the second). When she quietly reprises 'You Can't Get a Man with a Gun' at the end of the first act, it seems unlikely that anyone who ever struggled between career and love could find the dilemma dated. . ."

David Patrick Stearns in USA Today: ". . .The Irving Berlin score is a knockout at nearly every turn. Bernadette Peters is never less than terrific on stage. The production concept -- even if you disagree with it -- is full of lush, sunset colorings of Midwestern America. Call me a pushover, but all of this leaves me extremely grateful. . . Director Graciela Daniele gives the show added emotional dimension. Butler and Oakley are so believable as a couple --with the virile-but mellifluous-voiced Tom Wopat as the former and Peters as the latter -- it's hard to see how Merman would've fit in here . . .[Peters] reveals the character's inner life even more than Betty Hutton in the 1950 MGM film version. Also, the Peters voice and presence are a powerful plus in all the great musical numbers; it's great to see her with such good material." Fintan O'Toole in Daily News: "With musicals, 'simple and innocent' usually means 'corny and awkward.' Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun is a rare exception. Like its heroine, it takes all the skepticism you can throw at it and gets on with the show. . .it is almost impossible not to have a good time. . . Berlin's songs, after all, are still an irresistible force. He had a particular genius for making carefully calculated effects seem completely spontaneous. . .the relationship between Peters' Annie Oakley and her love and rival Frank Butler is presented, not as the taming of a shrew, but as a fable of sexual equality. These changes allow both the audience and the performers to enter into the spirit of the story without doubts or reservations. Peters and Tom Wopat, who plays Butler, can go for pure, unapologetic entertainment. And they revel in it. . .[Peters] is so vibrant, so commanding and so funny. . .With a voice that combines sweetness with power and with her perfect comic timing, Peters makes you forget that the role was written for Ethel Merman and makes it her own. . . Most important, [Peters and Wopat] have a real rapport. Especially in 'An Old Fashioned Wedding,' their jousting seems delightfully unforced and playful."

Donald Lyons in New York Post: ". . .A good musical needs songs with lilt, power and personality.   And it needs stars with lilt, power and personality to put them across. Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat delivering Irving Berlin's score are the very definition of glorious Broadway entertainment. . . Torrential red curls spilling down like a honey waterfall, Bernadette Peters is at first a goofy ragamuffin in buckram and denim. After a few weeks in Buffalo Bill's show, she's in stitched satin and white leather and hanging by her knees from a swing. She blends hilarity and pathos in the sublime 'You Can't Get a Man with a Gun.' Here's a song you really do walk out singing; with lyrics like 'You can't shoot a male in the tail like a quail,' you can't stop. Peters has fun with her numbers, scatting and drawing out and retarding a laugh rhyme till we hurt. She drops the humorous edge for a sweeping ballad of rapture, 'Lost in His Arms.' A skilled interpreter of Sondheim, Peters clearly feels at home in the wash of this strangely sad song and gives it a thrilling lift . . .But nothing matters when Peters and Wopat, those two stellar presences -- the sun in the morning and the moon at night, as a song in this very show puts it -- are front and center and illuminating the magic of Irving Berlin."

Ben Brantley in The New York Times: ". . . Ms. Peters, as you probably know, is one of the few great performers under 70 who came of age in the American musical theatre, and she still treats a Broadway stage as if it were her first home. When she starts to sing in that oversize little-girl voice, it feels like an invitation to walk straight into her heart. Even the silliest seeming ditties can become affectingly sincere confessions when delivered by Ms. Peters. She is an enduring and essential reminder of the emotional vitality of a genre that in recent years has lost its way . . . it is Ms. Peters who provides the show with its only genuine pleasures, and they come when she sings. The orchestrations of Ms. Peters' romantic numbers are joltingly different from any of the other songs, more appropriate to a cabaret act or concert. They have the virtue, however, of nicely setting off the shimmering layers of feeling Ms. Peters brings to ballads like "Moonshine Lullaby" and "I Got Lost in His Arms." She seems to pull us all into a collective embrace with a mere catch in her voice or a hint of a tear, and there are moments when nothing seems to exist but the star, the song and the audience . . .."