BARBARA COOK -- HEAR WHY SHE IS SUCH A LOSS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Barbara Cook circa 2016

Thank God for YouTube! Were it not for this time machine open to all on the Internet, there would be generations that could never understand the self-transformation of Barbara Cook and why she earned legendary stature in vocal artistry. 

At age 89, Cook died August 8 of respiratory problems – and that was only six years after being honored by her nation and today’s most famous Broadway divas at the Kennedy Center honors, with then president Obama and first lady Michelle watching. 

It was two distinct careers that brought Barbara Cook that prominence. The second evolved after a decade of what she describes as a broken marriage and alcoholic slovenliness. The brilliance of her return in the late seventies, at an age when most singers expect a downward arc in their careers, has added to the awe. She battled poundage all her later life, but decided that artistry conquered weight, and she knew how to control the artistry.

YouTube lets us dip into both worlds of Barbara Cook. The first is the sudden and almost unbelievable way she captured Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s with a lyric soprano that combined clarity and delicacy with an attractive, perky farm girl naturalism and the power to pin audiences to the back wall.

Composers were aghast and  clamoring – including Rodgers and Hammerstein  for revivals of “Oklahoma” and “Carousel.”  Without subscribing to special music services,  YouTube has excerpts from several original cast albums  including “I’ll Show Him” from “Plain and Fancy.”  


Perhaps most enduring is the high standard she set in a box office flop that is  now regarded as a virtuoso showcase,  Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” in 1956. Under Bernstein’s direction, Cook originated the role of Cunegonde and its ungodly difficult “Glitter and Be Gay.” It demands a flair for comedy and for impossible coloratura trills isolated at Bernstein’s insistence note by note, something like cough by cough.

Musical training has advanced in 60 years, so teachers offer “Glitter and Be Gay” where most singers in the 1950s wouldn’t dare, some of today’s singers can and most really ought not try.   Singers escape by camping up the comedic elements and sliding by the singing.  (In my experience, only Kristen Chenoweth seems to combine the ham and vocal power to carry it off as something casual).

"Music Man" in the 1950s

During this early period Cook leaped to fame as the original Marian the librarian in “The Music Man” opposite Robert Preston. Her original album greatness can be found, not only in a duet with the Buffalo Bills but also “Goodnight My Someone”   and “Till There Was You.” 

She was so good and so appealing she was  considered by Hollywood for the 1962 film. Typically producer Jack Warner wanted stars --  Cary Grant instead of Preston. But Grant violently declined, so the movie celebrity as well as singing attention  went to Shirley Jones.  YouTube has a Bell Telephone Music Man medley by Cook that may also have served as Hollywood audition in 1960.  No offense to Shirley Jones, who can sing and  acted the part notably well, but Cook would have sung it better. 

In the 1960s she was still in demand, originating the lead in “She Love Me,” a musical recently revived on Broadway, live-streamed on the Internet and moved to London.  (She has revisited the music on her concert tours.)

By the late 1960s and throughout the early 1970s, as she has related, the bottom dropped out of her marriage and her self-confidence, finally resurrected in the late 1970s by pianist Wally Harper, now deceased.

Her voice may have darkened somewhat over time but if anything increased its power and Cook now turned to the cabaret world and a masterful ability with lyrics. She now preached getting inside the lyrics and the mood as essentials. The big and gentle voice was still there. It requires, of course,  the sort of vocal talent she has, to dip and soar at will, combined with  the life experience she earned to know what the composer was trying to say and how to say it. 

“Masterful,” incidentally,  is no hyperbole because premier music schools such as Juilliard turned to her to teach master classes to their professionally-minded students. Since appearance or sex appeal matters so much in popular culture, her artistry has been limited to cabarets, Broadway appearances and in these days of music services, audio listeners everywhere.

Her albums drew more fans as did her Carnegie Hall concerts in 1980 and 2006,  along with a  PBS hour from the 1980s still rousing on You Tube. 

Believe me, we are not exhausting YouTube on Cook selections, plus you can learn more if you like reading -- it was only last year that she co-wrote her life story: “Then and Now: A Memoir.” Or you can hear the other famous singers pay tribute to her repertoire.

But on her own, learn how smooth and easy she was with Gershwin  and why so much of  her fame stems from status as the definitive interpreter  of Sondheim. She became central to his Broadway musical showcases even into  recent years. 

I can only think of two singers who have had such live performance impact over 70 years and they are quite different except for work ethic and determined self-improvement  – Tony Bennett, who still performs, and Barbara Cook, who remains alive to me because of the Internet.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.