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By
Roberta Hershenson |
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Barbara Cook. |
Cook as Cunegonde in Candide. |
Cook in her Tony-award winning role as Marian the Librarian
in The Music Man. |
Cook as Amalia Balash in She Loves Me. |
Cook with longtime collaborator, the late Wally Harper.
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Barbara
Cook is such a universally praised artist, a soprano so widely
loved and admired, that it seems stage light has endowed her
with a halo. At 77, long past the age when other singers
have retired – or bowed to failing vocal cords –
this veteran of musical theater, cabaret and the concert stage
is still nailing high notes, achieving shimmering pianissimos
and moving audiences with her heartfelt performances. Cook,
who is famously down-to-earth, a diva without airs, takes
in stride the public and critical adulation that keeps coming
her way. But she never imagined as a girl in Atlanta, she
says, the places she would go and the people she would know.
People like the conductor James Levine,
who came to hear her cabaret show several times this past
spring at the Café Carlyle in New York City and, she
said, was so enthusiastic that “I wish I’d had
a tape recorder”; Josh Groban, with whom she sang in
July at the Hollywood Bowl in a 75th-birthday tribute to Stephen
Sondheim; Sondheim himself, whose music she reveres; and opera
star Deborah Voigt and jazz artist Dianne Reeves, who joined
her onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in a summer program called
“Great American Concert: Great American Women.”
She might have gone into opera, which she
says she has loved since she was eight years old. But
she never even considered it. “I didn’t feel
equipped to do opera at all,” Cook said when I interviewed
her in June. “I had this light soprano voice, and I
thought those big, high notes I had were just me acting like
an opera singer, so I didn’t take them seriously.”
She took voice lessons – eventually studying with a
teacher whose technique she credits for keeping her voice
healthy through the years – but she did not learn to
read music. After high school she went to work as a typist,
and then, at age 20, accompanied her mother on a trip to New
York. Now the proverbial success story takes over. Harboring
dreams of becoming a singer, Cook stayed in New York after
her mother returned home. “It didn’t feel
brave at the time,” she says, recalling what seemed
like an endless three years of clerical work before she landed
her first Broadway role in 1951 as the ingenue lead in the
musical Flahooley. Roles in Carousel, Plain and
Fancy and Candide soon followed.
Candide, by Leonard Bernstein, for which
Cook created the role of Cunegonde, established her as a phenomenon
in 1956. One aria-like song, “Glitter and Be Gay,”
had high notes – strings of them – that she had
never dared to sing in public before. But Bernstein was
wonderful to work with, she said, “so kind and supportive
and fun and bright that he made me feel I could do anything.”
In 1957 she played Marian the Librarian
alongside Robert Preston’s title character in the first
Broadway production of Meredith Willson’s The Music
Man, winning a Tony Award for her performance. She
also starred, in 1963, in She Loves Me by Jerry Bock
and Sheldon Harnick, and has performed in revivals of The
King and I, Oklahoma and Showboat. Cook sings
songs from these musicals and others in concert, and has also
gathered them into a one-woman show, Barbara Cook’s
Broadway, which was recorded live at the Lincoln Center
Theater in New York on DRG Records in April of last year.
On the CD, which is among Cook’s many recordings and
cast albums, she is alternately nostalgic, wistful, spunky
and folksy as she alternates singing with talking to
the audience. She says she wishes she had originated a role
in at least one Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and that she
always wanted to see her name in real lightbulbs on a theater
marquee. Of her early theater days, she says, “They
tell me now I was part of the Golden Age of musical comedy,
but half the time I was wondering where my next job was going
to come from.”
The recording includes relatively unknown
songs, such as “Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five,”
a paean to aging from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner; “Tonight at Eight”
and “A Trip to the Library” from She Loves
Me; and “Look What Happened to Mabel” from
Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel, which has almost
a vaudeville sound. It also features several achingly sensitive
songs, such as “This Nearly Was Mine” from South
Pacific, and “In Buddy’s Eyes” from
Sondheim’s Follies, which Cook sings with finely
wrought, unadorned emotion.
Sondheim, around whom she has built another
one-woman show, Mostly Sondheim, is one of Cook’s
favorite songwriters. “Stephen has changed the face
of our American musical theater,” she tells the Lincoln
Center audience. When interviewed, she said that she
loves working with Sondheim and has a “more personal”
relationship with him than she had with Bernstein. She described
phoning him for his reaction to Mostly Sondheim after
he saw it. “I called to see if he was bothered by any
of the talk in the show because sometimes I quoted him directly
and I didn’t want to put words in his mouth that he
might object to,” she recalled. “He did object
to being compared to Picasso in the sense of being a seminal
figure. I told him I was going to say it anyway.”
Barbara Cook’s Broadway
is a collaboration with Cook’s longtime arranger and
accompanist, the late Wally Harper, who died last October
at age 63. A song near the end of the show, “Time Heals
Everything” by Jerry Herman, is eerily prescient of
the heartache to come six months after the recording was made.
“If I’m patient the break will mend, and one fine
morning the hurt will end,” the lyrics say; “It’s
hell that I’m going through.” Cook has spoken
openly about loss of Harper, with whom she worked closely
for nearly 30 years and on whom she depended for everything
from finding the right chords to sharing insights about lyrics. The
two traveled the world giving concerts, and performed together
at the White House for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, Sr.,
and Clinton. “It’s very hard,” she
said in our interview. “It has been eight months
and still every now and then I come across a photo, or his
handwriting, and start sobbing. I miss him.” She
has been looking for a new accompanist-arranger, and says
she will probably wind up with more than one. The ideal person
will be “someone who’s competent at the piano,
someone with the ability to put his life into his music,”
she said.
That is an apt description of Cook’s
own style: She is known for offering herself and the sum of
her experiences to her audience. She has battled demons ranging
from depression to alcoholism to obesity. She was divorced
in the mid-1960s from David LeGrant, the father of her only
child, Adam LeGrant, 45, an aspiring actor living in Los Angeles. After
what she said were years of alcoholism, she stopped drinking
for good in 1977, but the extra weight she gained –
she was slim when she did Candide – has remained. Her
Broadway career foundered in the late 1960s, due both to shifting
tastes in music and her personal troubles. But then came the
1970s, her fruitful partnership with Harper and an enduring
second act as a concert and cabaret singer. Cook is a darling
of the critics, who grow only more ardent as time goes by. They
call her “the greatest theatrical singer in concert
at the moment” (The London Times), “a
singer at her absolute peak” (The New York Times),
“a divinity in human guise” (The Los Angeles
Times). “She has it all – musicianship, of
course, clarity, phrasing, a sure touch and feel for the mood
of every lyric,” said a critic for The New York
Observer.
Dressed in black, often with an eye-popping
necklace framing her face, she sings with the house lights
on. This is not to look into her listeners’ eyes,
but to relate better to the audience, she has said. Cook uses
a microphone until the last song in a concert; then she ditches
the mike and sings unamplified. “I hope it makes people
lean forward to listen a little closer and I hope it makes
them feel more connected to me and to others in the audience.
It’s a little coup de théâtre I stole from
Tony Bennett.” Whether singing or talking, conversing
with one person or many, she rarely hits a phony note. Natural
and sincere, she speaks with a laid-back hint of a Southern
accent, frequently dropping her g’s and pronouncing
“to” like tuh. Abstract questions about why people
sing, or what a song actually is – in the context of
creative expression, that is – don’t interest
her; what she cares about are the subtleties of a real song
she can wrap her voice around. And don’t expect
any mystical descriptions of the way music speaks to her.
“I examine the songs I sing very deeply, but there’s
not a hell of a lot to do” in approaching a new one,
she said. “I read it and usually understand pretty
quickly what the author is talking about. If I don’t,
I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure it out.”
She gives master classes in which she pushes
singers to peel away the layers of their defenses –
and pretenses – until they reveal something raw and
true about themselves. “What I want to see –
and what I believe audiences want to see – is a human
being standing up there who is ‘letting them in.’
If I can get just one or two authentic moments out of these
young singers, I’m really pleased. I ask them to investigate
the lyric, to speak it,” she said. “Most
people are so concerned with the voice and the notes that
they never ‘get off the page.’ Then their entire
message becomes, ‘Look, I can sing,’ and that’s
pretty boring.” Pitch, for instance, should be
a given. The rest is the cream on top of the coffee.”
Her advice to young singers is to know
who they are and not waste their time trying to be like someone
else. “We must try to accept and embrace the idea
that we’re okay, that the audience and the world want
us, not who we think we should be. Once you find a way to
that belief, you’re home free. It’s about authenticity,”
she continued. “I think this is true for life as well
as for singing.”
Life these days is good, she said. She
lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Riverside
Park, where she finds contentment in the passing scene. “I
get to see all the birds and bees and the river,” she
said. “Not a day goes by that I don’t look
out the window and appreciate what I have – the fact
that I’m still alive and can still sing.” And
how does she account for her vocal longevity, aside from the
excellent technique she learned more than 50 years ago? “Genes
and common sense,” she said. “If it hurts,
I don’t do it.”
Cook’s upcoming performances include
a one-woman show at The Performing Arts Center at Purchase
College in Purchase, NY, on October 9, followed by a joint
concert with Audra McDonald at the New Jersey Performing Arts
Center in Newark on November 19. Then, on January 20
of next year, she will take the stage at the Metropolitan
Opera with a program all her own. It is the first time since
Vladimir Horowitz presented a concert there in 1986 that someone
outside the Met’s own roster has received such an honor. “I’m
nervous already,” Cook said.
She also has a new CD ready for release
in the fall, again on DRG Records. Titled Tribute,
it features songs that Cook sang during her spring engagement
at the Café Carlyle, including, “I Got the World
on a String,” “Last Night When We Were Young,”
“Mr. Bojangles” and “Make the Man Love Me.”
The songs – and the show itself – were a tribute
to Wally Harper as well as to the late cabaret singer Bobby
Short and the songwriters Harold Arlen and Arthur Schwartz.
How long can Cook go on performing? Considering
how well her voice has stood up, why not indefinitely? “Wally
always said, ‘We’ll rig a walker with a microphone
and we’ll get you out there,’” she said. The
anecdote reminds her of a story. “Wally and I both
got lifetime achievement awards from the Manhattan Association
of Cabarets and Clubs about six years ago. Wally decided we
should make our entrance using fold-up walkers. We thought
the audience would howl with laughter. We entered from separate
sides of the stage, and not a titter from the audience. Clearly
they thought it was for real. Wally usually had great ideas,
but this is one fiasco we were finally able to laugh at once
we got over the shock and embarrassment.”
Obviously, the audience wouldn’t
have cared how she came onstage. For music lovers, Cook
is the cream on top of the coffee. |
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| Roberta
Hershenson is a freelance writer specializing in arts and
culture. She writes a weekly arts news column as well as features
for The New York Times, and also contributes to other
publications. |
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Photo
credit:
Image 1 and 5: Mike Martin - London |
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