The lights were dimmed on Broadway on 9 August, now that one of the greatest interpreters of the standard song repertoire has finally left us, just a few months after she announced her official retirement and a mere few weeks short of her 90th birthday.
This performer was indeed a legend in her own lifetime, on stage in musical theatre, in concert and on television, in cabaret and on record, and there really was nobody quite like her.
Michael Darvell recalls the outstanding talent that was BARBARA COOK…
The American singer-actress and cabaret performer Barbara Cook was in my eyes a truly legendary figure.
I can remember hearing her for the first time on her famous Carnegie Hall comeback album recorded in 1975. I had never heard a voice like that of Miss Cook’s.
I may have had similar feelings when discovering Ethel Merman or Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand, but they all disappeared into the ether when I listened to the recording of Barbara Cook’s opening number at Carnegie Hall – ‘Sing a Song With Me’, written for her by lyricist Paul Zakrzewski and her musical director for more than 30 years, Wally Harper.
She then sang ‘Who Are You Now?’ from Funny Girl, ‘Wait Till You See Him’ from By Jupiter and so too the numbers she made all her own, ‘Dear Friend’ and ‘Vanilla Ice Cream’, which she sang in the original Broadway production of She Loves Me.
By then I was totally captivated by Cook’s voice and the personality that went with it. Other highlights on the Carnegie Hall album include Schwartz and Dietz’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’, Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn’s ‘Carolina in the Morning’, Rodgers and Hart’s ‘He Was Too Good To Me’ and Jerry Herman’s ‘Time Heals Everything’, among many other classic tracks.
I had never heard a voice before with such warmth, depth, clarity, tone, range and perfect enunciation. Since then Cook has remained my all-time favourite female singer with the world’s greatest and unbeatable voice.
Over the years her voice never seemed to alter. Even when well into her seventies, Cook still sounded like a teenager. She did indeed have a young lyric soprano voice all her life and it just got better and better throughout her career.
Much of the success of the Carnegie Hall concert and other performances over the following 30 years was due in no small way to Wally Harper, whose choice of material and the musical arrangements were impeccable, so much so that Cook dedicated her 2005 album, Tribute, to Harper, following his death a year earlier.
Together they really made the music and the lyrics come alive in a further dozen albums and of course in their concert and cabaret tours which took them around the world.
Cook was born on 25 October 1927 in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Nell Harwell and Charles Bunyan Cook.
Her parents divorced when she was still a youngster and she carried on living with her mother after her father left. There were no thoughts of her becoming a chanteuse then, even though she did sing from an early age.
In 1948 she visited New York with her mother and decided to stay and work as an actress. Singing at various clubs saw her eventually playing the famous Blue Angel club in 1950 where she had seen her idol, Mabel Mercer.
The musical Flahooley followed a year later and then a revival of Oklahoma! She did some television work and then a revival of Carousel in which she played Carrie Pipperidge.
This led to a role in Plain and Fancy, Albert Hague and Arnold Horwitt’s musical about the Amish community which was quite a big success and saw her gaining confidence as both actress and singer.
She auditioned in 1956 for Leonard Bernstein when he was casting Candide, his operetta that has never really been a great success artistically, despite the multifarious hands involved in the writing of the book and lyrics, including at various stages of its career Lillian Hellman, Hugh Wheeler, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur, John La Touche and even Stephen Sondheim.
Notwithstanding, however, Cook was magnificent in managing to cross over from popular song to operetta in her performance as Cunegonde and her famous and thrillingly high soprano voice was perfect for the aria ‘Glitter and Be Gay’.
The following year saw Cook in another revival of Carousel, this time playing Julie Jordan. But then came a really successful new hit show, and one especially good for the actress as she won a Tony Award for playing Marian Paroo, the librarian, in Meredith Willson’s long-runner The Music Man. Sadly she didn’t get to play the part in the film version as that went to Shirley Jones.
After that Cook was in two more musicals, The Gay Life and Something More!, but neither was successful.
However, Cook did enjoy great personal success again as Amalia Balash in Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s 1963 musical She Loves Me.
This was a charming piece with a touch of the operetta about it and Cook’s signature numbers ‘Vanilla Ice Cream’ and ‘Dear Friend’ stayed in her concert repertoire for just about evermore.
Revivals of Fanny, The King and I and Show Boat, and tours of The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Funny Girl kept the actress busy for a time.
She also played some straight theatre roles in Muriel Resnik’s Any Wednesday, Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders and Maxim Gorky’s Enemies.
But, after The Grass Harp, a musical version of Truman Capote’s book in 1971, the musical stage seemed to give up on Cook.
It was then that her problems with depression, weight gain and alcoholism kicked in. She had been divorced from her husband, theatre coach David LeGrant. They had married in 1952 and had one son, Adam.
Luckily, at this difficult time, Harper came along, their Carnegie Hall concert changed everything and Cook gained a new life ahead of her in concert and cabaret work.
She really owed the success of her second ‘career’ wholly to Harper who also had problems of his own connected with drinking. Cook writes very movingly about her alcoholism in her memoir Then and Now (HarperCollins, 2016).
The Carnegie Hall concert was recorded and it was to be the first of many great albums to come from the Cook-Harper partnership.
They include recordings of the songs of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, and the lyrics of Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II, a salute to theatre director Gower Champion and, of course, a healthy helping of Stephen Sondheim.
Of all the many albums they recorded, it is Barbara Cook live at Carnegie Hall again in 2001 singing Mostly Sondheim that is the one to have, because it is not only a definitive collection of songs by Sondheim, but it also covers some of the classic songs that Sondheim wished he had written himself, including ‘Buds Won’t Bud’, ‘The Eagle and Me’, ‘I Had Myself a True Love’, ‘I Got Lost in His Arms’, ‘The Trolley Song’, ‘When in Rome’ and ‘San Francisco’.
It is also available on DVD on the DRG label. Because Cook never made a feature film, there is very little of her singing in vision, so this is a collectable rarity indeed.
I remember first seeing Cook in London at Country Cousin, the now (or then) legendary cabaret venue at World’s End, Chelsea in the late 1970s, and then meeting her at a reception for her first Donmar Warehouse season in Covent Garden in 1986, the first of many interviews I did with her.
It was shortly after the BBC TV screening of an Omnibus programme about creating the concert performances of Sondheim’s Follies at Lincoln Center, which for me was another revelation, as London had not by then seen a staging of the show.
However, the UK immediately took Cook to its collective heart and her success here was repeated all over the US and around the world as far away as Australia.
She was honoured wherever she went, including The White House. She just never seemed to stop working and she carried on singing until almost the end of her life and still the voice never appeared to change that much.
At aged 70 she still had the voice of a 17-year-old, as she marked the passing of another decade at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
After Harper died in 2004 Cook carried on working and even got to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, the first popular female singer to do so in the venue’s history.
For her 80th birthday in 2007 she celebrated at the London Coliseum and later returned to Broadway in Sondheim on Sondheim and worked on until her retirement in 2017.
What a career, what a singer and what an interpreter of the Great American Songbook. There really will never be another Barbara Cook. She was the one and the only and it has been great knowing her over the past 40 years.
Thank goodness we still have all her albums to remind us what an abiding star talent she had.
Barbara Cook was born on 25 October 1927 and died on 8 August 2017. R.I.P.
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