BERNADETTE PETERS - At 60. Yes, sixty.

Weaned on the haughty grandeur of All About Eve's Margo Channing, I was prepared to have my soul singed while talking on the phone with La Bernadette. That's Peters, to you civilians. After all, she is a shining survivor of that almost extinct species - the Broadway diva.

One of the foremost interpreters of Sondheim and star of fascinating failures, including Mack and Mabel, Pennies from Heaven and even a musical version of Fellini's La Strada, she came to prominence as the generation of divas led by Ethel Merman and Mary Martin was fading from the stage and retreating to the concert platform. Peters, star of two landmark Sondheim musicals, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, is taking the same route.

After being lauded in two of Merman's greatest roles, the gun-toting title character in Annie Get Your Gun and child-toting Mama Rose in Gypsy, Peters is devoting her time to concerts and dogs (no, not revivals of Mack and Mabel).

The diva will be in town Friday to perform with the North Coast Men's Chorus at the Allen Theatre in Playhouse Square. Bernadette and a gay men's chorus seem as inevitable a meeting as pesto sauce and linguini.

Peters doesn't come across with either the brass of Merman or the lunatic sexuality of her look-alike, Betty Boop. She greeted me with "Hi, this is Bernadette," in the cheerful tone of a neighborhood Girl Scout hoping to make a killing on thin mints.

Peters, you will be dismayed to learn, has absolutely no memory of ever having set foot within Cuyahoga County, even though she played Playhouse Square in the early 1970s (a variety show). But she has dim recollections of a jovial John Kenley. As a teenage member of a Kenley cast of Gypsy playing Columbus in 1962, she may have had an eerie glimpse of her future struggles with one of musical theater's female Mount Everests, Mama Rose, while watching Betty Hutton wrestle with the role.

"The poor woman just wasn't up to it," said Peters, "and, because of the demands of summer stock, she didn't even have time to memorize her lines."

In an attempt to tap into her creative process, I asked if there was any difference between performing a song she had created or a well-known standard. The answer, alas, didn't come out of Stanislavsky.

"No, I just act them all," she blithely assured me. "It's all the same."

On the subject of what she'll be performing Friday: lots of Sondheim and, to shock the sophisticated Broadway-ites, that old beloved bit of Americana, "Shenandoah."

"They never expect that," Peters said.

Eager to know if there would be any Dollys in her future, we were disheartened to learn that she doubts there could be anything after Mama Rose and Annie. Only a tempting future masterpiece would lure her back into a long stay on Broadway.

Mack and Mabel is a distant memory for Peters, except for warm recollections of the brilliant way that Robert Preston could transform something as mundane as putting on a hat into a moment of brilliance. Pennies from Heaven, the bittersweet film in which she starred opposite then-boyfriend Steve Martin doing a dazzling recreation of Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance," was a major box-office catastrophe in spite of its many wondrous moments.

It failed "because it starred a famous comedian and tried to pass itself off as a comedy," she said.

There's no gazing back for this pragmatist. She'd rather look forward to her next project, such as Broadway Barks, the annual concert she created with Mary Tyler Moore to raise funds for New York-area pet shelters.

Peters' children's book with illustrator Liz Murphy, also titled Broadway Barks, will be published in late April. It is dedicated to her late husband, investment advisor Michael Wittenberg, who died in a helicopter crash in 2005. The book tells of a dog who can't make it in show business because everyone hates his voice, until a little girl discovers the beauty in his bark.

Her years of friendship with Sondheim seem to have rubbed off: The book includes a CD with a Peters song performed by the pooch-loving diva herself.

Bernadette Peters and the North Coast Men's Chorus
8 p.m. Friday, March 28
Playhouse Square's Allen Theatre
$10-$105
216.241.6000