Peters will add a song of her own to her repertoire Saturday night at PPAC.

AP / LOUIS LANZANO

Bernadette Peters has been singing most all her life. Now meet Bernadette Peters the composer.

The star of Broadway, film and TV will be capping off her concert this weekend at the Providence Performing Arts Center with a lullaby she composed in a creative burst. Peters appears with the Rhode Island Philharmonic for a pops concert Saturday night at 8.

“I never wrote a song before in my life,” said Peters from New York. “I was in a plane coming back from some place, and all of a sudden this song came out of me, the music and the lyrics all at the same time.”

Peters, winner of two Tony awards and nominated for five others, said she rushed home from the airport and sang the song into a tape recorder so she wouldn’t forget it. Now she includes it in her concerts.

“I wondered if I’d be embarrassed to sing it,” she said. “I mean, how good is it, how bad is it? But it ended up being a very lovely song.”

She wrote “Kramer’s Song” for a good cause. A CD of the tune will be included in the jacket of her new children’s book, written to raise money for her Broadway Barks charity. Peters and pal Mary Tyler Moore started Broadway Barks 10 years ago to raise money for New York-area shelters. The organization holds an annual adopt-a-thon.

The book, also called Broadway Barks (Blue Apple, $18), is due out next month. It’s about a homeless pooch named Douglas, and is dedicated to her late husband, Michael Wittenberg, who died at 43 in a 2005 helicopter crash.

Peters, who wanted to talk about nothing but dogs during her recent interview, said the book tells how Douglas sings on stage. But the audience only hears barking and laughs at him. Then he starts to dance, but the audience sees only jumping, and laughs even louder.

Douglas is pulled off stage and is very dejected, until a little girl comes up to him and says how much she loved his singing and dancing. Would he like to come home with her?

Peters, who is 60, has mostly been doing concerts of late. She played Momma Rose (“the Hamlet of Broadway for women”) in the 2003 revival of Gypsy on Broadway, but said it would take another plum role to get her back on stage doing eight shows a week. And she doesn’t like touring. She’d rather be able to get home to her pets, shaggy 11-year-old Kramer (the very same one of the song title) and Stella, her 10-year-old pit bull.

But she is in the initial stages of putting out a new record that would feature music she grew up with — Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald. She’s planning to call the disk Body and Soul.

Peters, born Bernadette Lazzara in Queens, got her start in show business when she was just 3, on the Juvenile Jury television show, where children gave advice to celebrities. She had her Equity card by 9, and made her Broadway debut a decade later.

She has done a fair amount of film, co-staring with then-boyfriend Steve Martin in The Jerk and Pennies from Heaven, and she has done some television. But she is best known for her work on Broadway, and her knack for interpreting the music of Stephen Sondheim. She has put out two CDs of Sondheim’s music recorded live at Carnegie Hall.

And she will be singing Sondheim tomorrow with the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Also on tap are songs such as “Fever,” the American folk classic “Shenandoah,” and the Disney favorite “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

“It’s got a nice lyric — ‘makes no difference who you are.’ ”

Peters said she has also been using her concerts to try to sell her Miami vacation home. She makes a pitch from the stage.

“I have this vacation home I don’t use any more. And by accident, when I was in the town where the house is, I tried to sell it. I said this is really fun.”

It has been said that Peters manages to tap into her acting abilities when she sings. With that she agrees. She said she was studying singing and acting when she was in high school. And as a teenager she had strong feelings that she channeled into her songs.

“Being 17, I learned how to put all my emotions into my music,” she said.

“For me, I never sing a song because it has a nice melody. I sing a song because of what it says.”

Bernadette Peters joins conductor Francisco Noya and the Rhode Island Philharmonic Saturday night at 8 at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St. Tickets are $52 to $75. Call (401) 421-2787, or log onto www.ppacri.org.

cgray@projo.com