Bernadette Peters to Miss Additional Performances of Gypsy This Week

Bernadette Peters, star of the current Broadway revival of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical Gypsy, missed last evening’s performance of the show. This afternoon, it was announced that she would also be absent tonight and then, in the early evening, it was further announced that she will also miss both the matinée and evening performances on Wednesday, May 7. According to press releases received today, Peters “is battling a respiratory infection that has reoccurred. She is being treated with antibiotics” and her doctors “have advised her that she can return [to the show] on Thursday, May 8.”

The star had previously missed four performances during the show’s preview period; in all, as of tomorrow evening, she will have missed eight performances since Gypsy began previews on March 31. Her standby, Maureen Moore, has gone on in the role of Mama Rose when the star has been out of the production, which was directed by Sam Mendes.

Peters’s latest run of absences began on the day of the appearance of a New York Times article by Jesse McKinley titled “Gypsy Struts, Silencing Naysayers.” The piece maintained that the show, which had been “trashed in some newspapers and on Internet chat rooms before its opening,” had turned out to be “the best-received revival of the season.” McKinley noted that Peters’s having missed four preview performances had set off “another round of speculation that she was not up to the role,” but then added that, “paradoxically….Mr. Mendes said those days off suddenly transformed Ms. Peters’s performance into the one that wowed the critics.”

Although McKinley’s article held that critical response to the show was “almost unanimous,” there were, in fact, largely negative notices from Howard Kissel in the Daily News and Linda Winer in Newsday. In an e-mail response to a TheaterMania query received today before it was announced that Peters would again be out of the show this evening and tomorrow, McKinley wrote that his article “was focused on how the show changed from the beginning of previews to the opening night, so Bernadette’s absence last night isn’t really germane — or, of course, possible to get into my piece that ran that morning — though if she continues to miss performances, it will definitely merit a story on its own.”

Peters is a six-time Tony Award nominee, and a two-time winner for Song & Dance in 1986 and Annie Get Your Gun in 1999.