By Dominique Paul Noth
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| 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).
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| "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.
By Dominique Paul Noth
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| Shepard in his 20s |
The death of Sam Shepard brought back the summer of 1969 when my bride and I were housed on the same dorm floor as Shepard, then in his 20s and already a force in experimental circles though his most famous plays – “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West” -- were still a few years away. In his New Yorker tribute, critic Hilton Als rightly describes Shepard as close to being America’s first hip-hop playwright.
Even then, coming from Ellen Stewart’s off-Broadway stew at La Ma Ma, he was something of a sensation at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut – dressed in black with a cowboy hat, handsome and taciturn. The handsome and taciturn he kept all his life as playwright and actor.
I was flattered to be invited because I was merely the second-string drama critic at The Milwaukee Journal. (In those days, no one at our newspaper had any title, much less first or second string, but I only got the theater reviews the music critic Walter Monfried didn’t want and since he didn’t want Harold Pinter, Brecht, Ionesco, Becket or that “dreadful French pervert” Jean Genet, I was much in reviewer heaven – making enough of a mark that the now defunct New York Theater magazine tapped me as a correspondent).
The most memorable event of that year was my marriage. Part of our extended summer honeymoon was being invited to the O’Neill where I sat in and contributed to meetings with Philadelphia’s Ernie Schier, New York Herald Tribune’s Judith Crist (then noted movie critic but previously, as she put it, “Second string to God” – God being Walter Kerr) and several others who were supporting the National Theater Institute and would later found the American Theatre Critics Association.
I enjoyed running into Shepard in the hallway but cannot say I had intense conversations with him. I don’t think many critics ever had. I also found the young writer John Lahr hard to approach, but I did speak with a newcomer actor named Michael Douglas (attending with his mother) and also had some delightful chats with New York stage actor Earle Hyman, later best known as the Huxtables grandpere on “The Cosby Show.”
My memory going back is somewhat blurred because I am not sure if Hyman was there for some scenes that were staged by O’Neill artistic director Lloyd Richards or was part of the Trinidad troupe gathered by late poet and elegant conversationalist Derek Walcott – whom I was also in awe of. Here I witnessed the first US production of his “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” still a great work of poetry and drama but then unknown to the assembled critics. I recall liking it with an enthusiasm others blamed on my Midwest roots.
I confess being most impressed at the welcome as an equal by theater writers whose names I knew well – Henry Hewes, Eliot Norton, several others and Schier, who was inordinately kind to me and Louise. Even Crist put up with my disagreements about movies.
Why did these memories flood back with Shepard’s death? I’ve interviewed enough celebrities that I am long past name dropping. Besides, with the exception of Douglas, most of these names would mean nothing to outsiders.
Partly it was because I wish I had the foresight to get to know Shepard better and that twinge of regret was there when I last saw him in a movie, where the brevity of his role perfectly fit the story but had me wishing for more, “August: Osage County” (2013).
I recall those 1969 times because of what they represent of the American theater scene in what were then my salad days and the shaping environment for so many who made theater vital to their lives.
The regional theater movement was taking root, experimental playwrights of quite different weight like John Guare, Edward Albee and Shepard were trying their wings, and theater reviewers were being challenged nightly to stay with or stay ahead of what was happening in theater (not to mention film). And what was really happening was, like in modern music, often more daring than their editors were willing to hear about.
Today we are going through a remarkable Renaissance of writing talent streaming onto the stage from many mediums. They are not all designed to be as memorable as the touchstones of the past but it will be hard to say now which will endure in the future. All seem sturdily connected to the pulling threads of our society even as our society is being pulled apart in terms of cultural icons.
We may never again be as uniform in our judgment of art or great theater, but I recall how in 1969 we leaped toward the unknown, really without knowing what would endure. We have to do that even more today.
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.
