Barbara Cook (October 25, 1927 – August 8, 2017) was an American actress and singer who first came to prominence in the 1950s as the lead in Broadway musicals from which she won a Tony Award. She continued performing mostly in theatre until the mid-1970s, when she began a second career as a cabaret and concert singer. She also made numerous recordings.
Barbara Cook was born in Atlanta, but at an early age gravitated to New York to study singing. Her debut on Broadway was at the Broadhurst in May 1951 as Sandy in the Fain-Harburg musical Flahooley. The following year she married her drama coach David LeGrant. In 1953 she was Annie in Oklahoma! which she then toured throughout the US until 1956.That year Leonard Bernstein and the director Tyrone Guthrie auditioned her for the world premier of Bernstein’s new musical Candide which was to open at the Martin Beck Theatre that December. Barbara Cook’s electrifying portrayal of Cunegonde. Dressed in a ball gown with large ruffles at the shoulder and wearing a heavily plaited wig stunned the audience with her singing of the coloratura aria Glitter and be Gay.
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| Barbara Cook & Robert Preston |
Candide was not a commercial success and only ran for 73 performances, and in 1957 Barbara Cook took the role of Julie Jordan in a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel before being cast in the show that made her name more widely known. The Music Man opened at the Majestic Theatre in 1957 and Barbara Cook played the little town librarian Marian opposite Robert Preston (the part had been turned down by both Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly). While he belted out Seventy Six Trombones as if it was a Souza march she, one critic wrote, “had the breath of a long distance runner”. It was a triumph and Barbara Cook won a Tony Award for her performance.
She followed up with a suitably prim and proper Anna in The King and I and, in 1963, appeared for eight months in Bock and Harnick’s She Loves Me, with Daniel Massey. Connoisseurs of Broadway musicals recall the show with much affection and Allan Jay Lerner (author of My Fair Lady) always considered it, and Barbara Cook’s performance, underrated.
At the beginning of the Sixties Barbara Cook was on Broadway in Show Boat (1966) and in her first straight play (Any Wednesday, 1965). Then she appeared in several major coast-to-coast tours (notably as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, 1967). By then, however, her marriage had broken down and she was struggling with depression, alcoholism and obesity, ballooning from a svelte eight stone to more than 17 stone. As a result she found it difficult to obtain bookings. “I was a real non-functioning alcoholic,” she recalled later: “Dishes, always in the sink. The kitchen a mess. The bathroom a mess. Everything a mess.” At one point, she recalled, “I was so broke that I was stealing food from the supermarket by slipping sandwich meat in my coat pocket.”
But with the help of the pianist and composer Wally Harper, with whom she would collaborate for 30 years, she gave up drinking and reinvented herself as a solo artist, working in small New York clubs and finally launching her comeback at a sensational concert at Carnegie Hall in 1975. She went on to perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl and gave solo concerts throughout America. While she continued to struggle with her weight, she eventually accepted that she would never win: “I decided that I had to try to be comfortable with my body as it was, because otherwise you just live in a closet, you don’t go out,” she said.
Barbara Cook first appeared in Britain in 1978 when she did a short season at the Country Cousins in Chelsea, a tiny club on the Kings Road. She won nightly standing ovations but retained memories of “sharing the billing with the police, radio and taxi calls that came crackling over the PA system”. Somehow it never dulled her performance.
In 1986 the singer David Kernan mounted a season at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden called Showpeople ’86. Barbara Cook’s show – Wait ’til You Hear Her – immediately transferred to the West End. In July 1994 she returned to the big stage with a series of concerts at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Amid a programme of new songs and much-loved favourites her rendering of Love Don’t Need a Reason was particularly poignant.
In 1997, when Barbara Cook returned to London to celebrate her 70th birthday (helped by a few friends like Elaine Stritch) at the Albert Hall, one critic described her as “the greatest singer in popular music today”. In 2001, as exuberant as ever and singing with all the old panache, she returned to the West End and played to sell-out audiences. In June 2008, at the age of 80, she appeared in Strictly Gershwin at the Royal Albert Hall, with the full company of the English National Ballet.
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She continued to perform until June 2017 when she took to the stage, singing from a wheelchair, to promote the publication of her memoir Then & Now. Cook died from respiratory failure at her home in Manhattan on August 8, 2017, at age 89. The marquee lights of the Broadway theaters were dimmed for one minute in tribute to Cook on August 9.
(Edited from The Telegraph & Wikipedia) (Also a big thank you goes to jonthesYT @ YouTube for the mp3 of Barbara Cook singing the title song from "Any Wednesday", a comedy she played on Broadway (later made into a film with Jane Fonda. Her only single from 1965)