Editing Song and Dance (section)

==Critical reception==

Reviewing the London production, the ''[[Financial Times]]'' theatre critic Michael Coveney claimed, "It is a long time since I have sat through a more ostentatious, less theatrically coherent evening."

In [[Frank Rich]]'s review of the Broadway production for ''[[The New York Times]]'', he wrote: "Miss Peters is more than talented: As an actress, singer, comedienne and all-around warming presence, she has no peer in the musical theater right now. In her half of ''Song & Dance,'' she works so hard you'd think she were pleading for mercy before a firing squad. Yet for all the vocal virtuosity, tempestuous fits and husky-toned charm she brings to her one-woman musical marathon, we never care if her character lives or dies."<ref>{{cite news |last=Rich |first=Frank |title=Stage: 'Song & Dance,' with Bernadette Peters |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/19/arts/stage-song-dance-with-bernadette-peters.html |access-date=24 May 2023 |work=The New York Times |date=19 September 1985}}</ref>

[[John Simon (critic)|John Simon]], in ''The New York Magazine'', noted that the unseen men seemed "nebulous and unreal, so too, does the seen woman", and in the ''Dance'' half, "things go from bad to worse."  However, he wrote that "Miss Peters is an unimpeachable peach of a performer who does so much for the top half of this double bill as to warrant its immediate rechristening 'Song of Bernadette'. She not only sings, acts, and (in the bottom half) dances to perfection, she also, superlatively, 'is' ".<ref>{{cite book |last=Simon |first=John |title=John Simon on Theater: Criticism 1974-2003 |date=2005 |publisher=Hal Leonard Corporation |isbn=1-55783-505-5 |pages=359–361}}</ref>