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 moljul
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4/2/2001
From:
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Fav. BP CD: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
Fav. BP Song: Dublin Lady
| posted: 4/26/2003 at 1:38:51 PM ET
There is a great, rather lengthy article on Bernadette in this Sunday's NY Times. Compares her childhood with her mother a lot to the story of Gypsy. Very interesting article.
And I've always wondered if Bernadette ever legally changed her name to Peters - she hasn't. Legally she is still Bernadette Lazzara. Actually it didn't surprise me.
|  Christine-NYC
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Fav. BP Song: With So Little to be Sure Of
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Fav. BP CD: Bernadette Peters Loves Rogers and Hammerstein
| posted: 4/26/2003 at 3:19:20 PM ET
Well, actually I believe her legal name is now Bernadette Wittenberg.
It doesn't surprise me either (her not changing her name for a stage name). Bernadette is very true to herself and her family.
<3CMH<3
|  Jenny_loves_
bernadette
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Registered:
6/6/2002
From:
London | posted: 4/26/2003 at 4:06:03 PM ET
can anyone be bothered to type it up? I'd be really grateful!!!!
they say bernadette's wonderful..........and she is
xx Jenny xx
| moljul
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Fav. BP CD: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
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| posted: 4/26/2003 at 4:56:55 PM ET
Well actually unless she went through the process of filling out paperwork to actually become Wittenberg she wouldn't be that legally either. The wedding ceremony or a marriage license doesn't automatically do it. And something tells me she never did that either.
| moljul
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Fav. BP CD: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
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| posted: 4/26/2003 at 4:57:41 PM ET
Jenny, It's really lengthy. Sorry. If I get a chance maybe I can type it up in installments. LOL
| dynagirl
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Registered:
4/15/2003
From:
Suburban Maryland | posted: 4/26/2003 at 5:19:17 PM ET
Well, if it shows up on the website I could cut and paste it or e-mail it to you... Here's hoping it will be there by tomorrow!
*****************************
"Life is such a changing art,
and the world's not falling apart, because of me..."
Dar Williams
| Bwaybaby
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Registered:
3/10/2001 | posted: 4/27/2003 at 12:14:31 AM ET
Here's the link
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/arts/theater/27GREE.html
| moljul
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4/2/2001
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Fav. BP CD: I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
Fav. BP Song: Dublin Lady
| posted: 4/27/2003 at 12:25:07 AM ET
Her Stage Mother, Herself
By JESSE GREEN
ERNADETTE LAZZARA didn't want to go on the road. She was finishing the eighth grade at P.S. 58 in Queens and preferred to stay home with her Ozone Park friends. To them, at least, she was a normal kid. She told them as little as possible about her other life, the life across the river in Manhattan: the dancing lessons, the singing lessons, the go-sees and auditions.
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They must have known anyway; she had been performing in public since she was a panelist on "Juvenile Jury" at age 3. Now, at 13, she was a pro. She'd had her Equity card for several years already — got it doing a play called "This Is Goggle," which was directed by Otto Preminger and mercifully closed out of town. The reviews were scalding (one was headlined "I'm Gagging on `Goggle' ") but did include a mention of the petite blonde making her legit debut: "The audience seemed to be captivated by a tiny tot who had a rear end shaped like a Bartlett pear." Apparently, in 1958, you could write that way about a 9-year-old girl. It could even be considered a rave! Or at least it seemed like one to her mother, Marguerite, who repeated it so often that, 46 years later, Bernadette remembers it word for word. If indeed that's how the quotation ran. Perhaps Marguerite (her daughter sometimes wonders) altered it, "improved" it, just a bit.
Marguerite had certainly "improved" her daughter. For one thing, the girl was not in fact a blonde. "She would tint my hair a little," she remembers now. "When I would say, `What are you doing?' she'd say, `Oh, I'm just putting a little conditioner on it.' But slowly my hair got blonder and blonder!"
Bernadette Lazzara throws back her head and laughs. Her trademark mane of rotini curls — now an elegant shade of copper — shudders. "Well, I knew the truth," she adds, just as she knew the truth about one of her mother's other improvements. For along with the Equity card had come the opportunity to create a new persona. Explaining lamely that "Bernadette Lazzara" was too long to fit nicely on a marquee, Marguerite replaced it with a name that was just one letter shorter. The reason wasn't hard to discern: "Lazzara" was too Italian for a would-be all-American star. Marguerite killed two birds with one stone; her husband, who didn't like having his name erased (or, for that matter, having a child in show business) was named Peter.
And so, it was as Bernadette Peters that the girl auditioned, at the Variety Arts Studios on 46th Street, for the second national company of "Gypsy," in 1961. And it was as Bernadette Peters that she went on the road, along with her sister, Donna (who was also in the show), and their mother (who wasn't). For nine months she'd be a gypsy in "Gypsy," playing one of the Hollywood Blondes (among other small parts) while understudying the role of Dainty June, a child star during the last gasp of vaudeville. And though she went on as Dainty June only once, her mother improved that, too. When she typed up her daughter's résumés — clickety-clack in the night, on a typewriter Bernadette had won doing "Juvenile Jury" — somehow the word "understudy" vanished. "No one will know," said Marguerite.
Well, someone knew; Ms. Peters confesses the "résumé padding incident" whenever she sings songs from "Gypsy" in concert. And though she tells the story in a loving way (it's obvious she adored her mother), you can't help feeling she's building a moat between Marguerite's boundless ambition and her own highly regulated professionalism. But it's more complicated than that, since without Marguerite's ambition, Bernadette's professionalism would probably never have emerged — a paradox that is a core insight of "Gypsy" itself. All children are patched together from the tattered remnants of their parents' ambitions, conflicts, failures. Stage children more than most. But the challenge for everyone trying to grow up is the same: Will you have the nerve to create your own fabulous garment out of what your parents gave you? To tear it off, if necessary?
Bernadette Peters, the grown-up stage child, has a spectacular vantage point from which to consider the subject as she takes on the role of Rose, the stage mother of us all, in Sam Mendes's revival of "Gypsy," opening on Thursday at the Shubert Theater. The parallels to her own life, and her mother's, are eerie. In the musical's libretto, by Arthur Laurents, Rose attempts to escape a stifling working-class life in Seattle by pushing her daughters into show business; Ms. Peters says that Marguerite put her daughters onstage in hopes of escaping a housewife's dreary fate in Ozone Park. Rose is multiply divorced; Marguerite barely saw her husband, whose job delivering Italian bread started at 1 in the morning. More fundamentally, the source of Rose's drive turns out to be her own thwarted dream of stardom — she says she was born too early and started too late. Marguerite's dream was quashed by a strict Sicilian mother who saw the stage as a suburb of Sodom.
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As for the daughters, both Rose's and Marguerite's were ambivalent about the life laid out for them. At first, as a toddler, Bernadette enjoyed performing; it came naturally, a form of play that people inexplicably liked to watch. But the world in which such play is co-opted for commercial purposes did not appeal to her.
"Oh, it was my mother's idea," she says, relaxing in her dressing room before an afternoon rehearsal. "It wasn't like I asked to be in the business!" She didn't care for the bizarre children, accompanied by desperate mothers, she began to see at auditions: "They spent their whole time smiling for no reason, you know?" She forces a hard grin over her famously soft features, much like the one Dainty June, Rose's younger daughter, flashes maniacally in the current production. "I hated it. I would say to myself: `What am I feeling? Well, nobody's making me laugh, so I'm just gonna sit here and not smile.' I was the gloomy kid."
"Smile, Baby!" is one of Rose's famous leitmotifs; her girls tend to perform with grim determination. And no wonder. Rose is exhausting, unrelenting, "a pioneer woman without a frontier," as her awed boyfriend, Herbie, describes her. If the show is basically Rose's, one of the mysteries it addresses is how a child can come to embrace what her mother forces on her. Or off her; when, at the climax of the story, Rose bullies her "untalented" older daughter, Louise, into performing a strip act, it's a horror, but it's also a revelation. It's the beginning of Louise's independence and self-love — and the beginning of Gypsy Rose Lee. Undoing her dress, she undoes her mother.
Ms. Peters says her mother was ambitious but not brutal: happier than Rose, more sophisticated than the stage mothers she set herself above. Marguerite was in it not for glory but fun. Admittedly, it was her own fun, but she didn't exactly force Bernadette to go on the road. She had made a deal with her. In what was possibly her most cunning stratagem, she told her daughter something Rose wouldn't dream of: if she ever wanted to leave show business, she had only to say the word. Bernadette never did.
FOR the three Lazzaras (Ms. Peters has never legally changed her last name), life on the road in 1961 was not without its pleasures, especially early on, in Las Vegas, where the "Gypsy" company settled in for three months. Though she remembers playing two shows a day, seven days a week, Bernadette doesn't seem to have found it tiring. With no tutors or schooling of any sort, she had plenty of time to shop, to sunbathe, to show off her newly developing figure for the chorus boys by the pool at the Bali Ha'i hotel. If most of them were gay, so much the better.
But it was Marguerite who had a ball. She went out gambling after putting the girls to bed at night; Bernadette remembers the sound of silver dollars clanging in her mother's metal purse. She hobnobbed with the leads (Mitzi Green and, later, Mary McCarty) and, like Rose, made a fetish of feeding the kids in the company, though in her case it was home-made lasagna, not reheated restaurant chow mein. Like Rose, too, she'd take silverware from restaurants and hotels; when she died some 20 years later, she left her surprised husband a complete service of stolen silver.
Ms. Peters laughs at her mother's chutzpah, and then at how she copied it. "I remember I took a teapot once from room service, took it home to my father. He was horrified. And then he said, `Did you have to take one that was chipped?' Well, we didn't think there was anything wrong with it," she adds, "because it was in the script!"
What else was in the script, she didn't study closely. She'd never seen "Gypsy" before appearing in it; the family had money enough for classes, not shows. What she knew of the production was that it was the one to be in if you were a child. Its famous darkness was lost on her; if there were striking parallels between her life and the life of the character she understudied (while Donna was understudying Louise!) she didn't see them. "Maybe I didn't want to see," she says. "Didn't want to see a mother doing that to her daughter."
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When I ask her if it was, over all, a good experience for a youngster, she doesn't answer at first but seems to scan an image bank just behind her eyes for something to lock onto. Eventually she comes out with a seeming non sequitur. "I didn't know how to swim. I remember, in Las Vegas, I fell in, once, and they thought I was flailing, but I felt like: `It's pretty down here!' I might have been dying and I was thinking: `Look at the pretty color!' And suddenly my fear of water was gone, and I could have stayed in forever." After a while, I realize she's answered my question. Then she dismisses the image: "But I had to get my hair dry for the show that day, so up I came."
People who remember Ms. Peters as a sunny Betty Boop have been whispering since this production of "Gypsy" was announced that she was wrong for Rose. They felt that she was too pretty, too likable to play such an angry part. Perhaps they forgot her ferocious portrayal of Dot in "Sunday in the Park With George" — another musical about a woman trying to escape from her dress. In fact, a more complicated persona had long since begun to emerge, one that acknowledged the unsmiling, gloomy girl she'd been at auditions. Her singing became more complicated, too. It was always ethereal and husky; she'd copied this unconsciously from her mother, who had polyps on her vocal cords. But, with work, the different colors in her voice fused into one flexible instrument, quite capable of selling Rose's seven monumental Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim songs.
That it's the best part available to one of our best singing actresses would seem to be enough of a reason to cast Ms. Peters as Mama Rose. But there turns out to be something deeper than a commercial imperative at work. It's not really a question of whether the part fits her (though a 55-year-old musical-theater diva in the Broadway wastelands of 2003 is nothing if not "a pioneer woman without a frontier"). It "fits" only one person, Ethel Merman, for whom it was created in 1959. Rose was sewn directly onto Merman like a stripper's gown, highlighting her theatrical and vocal endowments while finessing the rest.
But a great part isn't really a finished costume that a star puts on; it's raw material through which some aspect of her soul is revealed. In that sense Rose is a role that Ms. Peters was born to play: a role to which she can bring something new and emotionally devastating. Merman's most famous successors, all more or less successful in the part, have been more or less Mermanesque in stature and delivery: Rosalind Russell in the movie, Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly on Broadway, Bette Midler on television. But because Ms. Peters is softer, smaller, more girlish — the real Rose Hovick was not yet 30 when she went on the road with her daughters — you may be forced into a more complicated and uncomfortable confrontation with her fate. Usually the show's focus is on how Rose almost ruins her daughters in creating them. Her famous 11 o'clock number, "Rose's Turn," is in most renditions a picture of an indomitable star breaking down in fury; it's a paradox that's thrilling and weirdly uplifting. Under Sam Mendes's direction, the song — and the show — are more about how Rose, deluded but still sympathetic, ruins herself.
Marguerite was luckier. She enjoyed and to some extent participated in her daughter's success, sewing the polka dots on her costumes for "Dames at Sea" and maintaining, as Mr. Sondheim's pithy lyric has it, "scrapbooks full of me in the background." She did not have to be pried, like Rose, from her daughter; she let go a little at a time, and her death in 1982 gently did the rest. Still, when I ask if Ms. Peters would encourage a child of hers to go into show business (she married Michael Wittenberg, an investment adviser, in 1996, but has no children), she gives me a look whose charming ferocity tells me she's got Rose down.
"Oh, no," she purrs. "Oh, no."
| angelgrl9
Registered User
Registered:
2/16/2003 | posted: 4/27/2003 at 2:00:19 AM ET
thanks for posting the write up, moljul, it was wonderful to read~
Lisa
|  Linnie4Bernadette
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12/8/2002 | posted: 4/27/2003 at 10:47:56 AM ET
I thought that this article was one of the best I've ever read!! I thought it was really neat how the author compared and contrasted Bernadette's childhood to that of Gypsy. It's neat to see the similarities, but thank god Bernadette's mom wasn't exactly like the stage mother that the real Rose was...lol! I thought it was hilarious that Marguerite (Bernadette's mom), like Rose, would steal silverware from restaurant and hotels. How incredibly ironic is that?!?! Anyways, I also thought it was really funny when Bernadette talks about swimming in the article, "It's pretty down here!" even though she might have been dying....LOL, I just thought it was really funny and cute the way she described it!
I really loved this article and thought it provided lots of great insight The author made a really great point about Bernadette being right for the role of Rose when he says "a great part isn't really a finished costume that a star puts on; it's a raw material through which some aspect of her soul is revealed." After reading this article i can see how personal bernadette can make this role...and just how great she'll be!!! 
~Linnie
| Jenny_loves_
bernadette
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Registered:
6/6/2002
From:
London | posted: 4/27/2003 at 12:29:40 PM ET
a fantastic article, thankyou so much moljul!
don't you think it was disgusting how the journalist described her when she was just a little girl? Its practacly paedophilic. Horrible to hear our sweet Bernadette degraded like that- I can't believe her mother was proud of it!
they say bernadette's wonderful..........and she is
xx Jenny xx
| Christine-NYC
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3/23/2002
From:
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Fav. BP Song: With So Little to be Sure Of
Fav. BP Show: Gypsy
Fav. BP Character: Marie (insert last name) lol There's a few
Fav. BP CD: Bernadette Peters Loves Rogers and Hammerstein
| posted: 4/27/2003 at 1:55:48 PM ET
BwayBaby, thank you for posting the link. The picture they use of Bernadette (now) as Rose is so dramatic...and the one of her at age 4 (on stage at that Easter Show) is adorable.
LOL was she actually smoking in that picture with her mother! teehee highly doubtful since she was only 13 years old. Too bad that pic is blury. Her Mom sort of looks like Tyne Daly in that photo. How ironic!
<3CMH<3
| Karen
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Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 4/27/2003 at 2:35:07 PM ET
The 1961 photo was shown on her Inside the Actor's Studio interview. It looks like she's holding a cigar, so I would say it's definitely a "joke" pose. Great article, I'm going to have to rush out and buy the actual paper this afternoon while I can still get it.
| Mabel
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Registered:
4/21/2003
From:
Boston, MA | posted: 4/28/2003 at 3:22:05 PM ET
moljul, Thank you so much for posting the article. I really enjoyed reading it.
| PATTY
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Registered:
3/1/2003
From:
tonawanda,n.y. | posted: 4/28/2003 at 10:47:52 PM ET
Moljul..Thank you for takig the time to post this wonderful article! How many of us former "talented" children see ourselves with our mothers'in the past?!Whether we chose to pursue a stage career or not,it really pulls at my heart,at least,to identify with Bernadette's/Rose's story and I know I will cry lots when I see the show in July,as I'm sure many others will who walked a different path-either by lack of real talent or who "had the dream but not the guts"! We all have a great story to tell,don't we?
To the loveliest lady of song!
You will keep on giving me joy forever...
| RobRamos
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Registered:
4/1/2003 | posted: 4/29/2003 at 5:22:25 PM ET
Jesse Green is to be commended for this thoughtful and very revealing profile of Bernadette Peters. So good to see a superbly written article like this one right before the show opens. I have a feeling that Bernadette will only et better and better in the role, as she always does--one of the reasons I have stayed FAR away from the show during the difficult preview period (which they inevitably are). I have never for a moment felt that Bernadette Peters "wrong" for this role. Anyone who read the original memoir GYPSY could see this was casting genius--the real Rose was much more like Bernadette Peters than Miss Merman. It will be interesting to see the reviews. Hopefully they will be constructive and try to avoid too many comparisons with the previous actresses who have played the role.
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