Finding Magic in Songs of Bernadette

Va-va-va-voom. Bernadette Peters sang at the Universal Amphitheatre on Friday night, and she brought her perfect hourglass figure with her. She is that rare, sexy diva who never seems secretly insane or about to involve you in some kind of emotional blackmail if you don’t love her forever.

Of course, her naturalness, her wholesome moxie, also cries out for a more intimate space. A diva needs her worshipers, but the Universal Amphitheatre is just too big for this performer, who is after all a creature of the theater. Her magic does not entirely translate to CD, film or TV. A barn-like venue is likewise not the perfect setting for her.

Peters doesn’t eat up a room like Bette Midler; she doesn’t have Barbra Streisand’s granite pipes. To paraphrase a lyric from her favorite composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, there’s something about “the way she catches light” when she’s on a stage. She knows it too--she throws back her head and stretches out her arms and lets the audience drink her in. This is not precious or conceited; she’s just sharing the wealth.

With a glow coming off her alabaster skin and complicated ringlets of hair, she sang a selection mostly of show songs, mostly by Sondheim. She wore two strapless gowns: a mauve sparkled number by Bob Mackie; and a simple black satin sheath by Donna Karan. She looked great.

She also sounded good, despite the occasional heavy reverberations coming off the microphone. Though still kittenish, she brought a mature emotional range to the Sondheim songs, and for the most part avoided his overdone numbers. She sang “Hello, Little Girl,” the leering wolf’s song from “Into the Woods,” and “Johanna,” the sailor’s love song from “Sweeney Todd.” She made a wistful dirge out of the lovely “With So Little to Be Sure Of” from “Anyone Can Whistle,” though a tense change in the lyric made the song somewhat confusing.

Comedic highlights included “Raining in My Heart,” from “Dames at Sea.” Four chorus men in Burberry raincoats and umbrellas joined the star in a gentle parody of standard production numbers. The large onstage orchestra, conducted by Marvin Laird, sounded smart. It put a new twist on “Move On” from Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” which was outfitted with a poppy orchestration, half Burt Bacharach, half standard Broadway.

As always, Peters shone in her ballads. Jerry Herman’s “Time Heals Everything,” which she sang on Broadway in the 1974 “Mack and Mabel,” has become her signature song, and for good reason. She prowls down deep into its stubborn heartache, and the passage of time has brought a new wisdom to it as well. Peters wasn’t going to include the song in the show, she said, but felt she had to because “it haunts people.” And she certainly showed why.

This concert, first performed at Carnegie Hall last December, was recorded for a CD called “Sondheim, Etc.: Bernadette Peters Live at Carnegie Hall.”