Rest in peace, Barbara Cook

[jo]

www.broadwayworld.com/article/Legendary-Barbara-Cook-Has-Passed-Away-at-89-20170808


She shared our admiration for Hugh!

I met her twice during the run of THE BOY FROM OZ --

*She came out of the stagedoor as I was leaving from the side door of the Imperial...and I had a chance to compliment her for her beautiful singing.

*At the closing show, she was seated two seats from where I was seated. She talked to us sitting nearby and then gave us confetti and other stuff that she said we could all throw onstage at curtain call. She had a large Tiffany bag which contained all the stuff she brought to the Imperial to celebrate the end of such a memorable and remarkable run!


When I saw TBFO in Sydney two years later -- On Opening Night, Hugh called out to her -- she was seated close to Deb on the side. He said he would love to ask her to join him onstage and maybe in a song, but her contract did not allow that. But we were all pleased to see her join other fans to cheer another Jackman memorable performance!


Rest in peace, Ms. Cook!


Jo

[jo]

It would have been nice to see a Hugh-Barbra duet.

And this duet from Oklahoma! ( with Michael Ball) is the one song that she could have sung with Hugh --


PEOPLE WILL SAY WE'RE IN LOVE

[jo]

She was an honorary Oz-a-lot, too

www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/barbara-cook-forever-carrying-a-tune/2011/11/29/gIQA3E1oKO_story.html?utm_term=.ce8cdcae6d9b

Style
Barbara Cook, forever carrying a tune


By Peter Marks December 2, 2011


NEW YORK — Here’s a Barbara Cook fun fact: She’s gaga for Hugh Jackman. As in crazy, over-the-moon, can’t-get-enough-of-him enraptured. “When he did ‘Oz,’ I saw it 16 times in New York,” she confesses, recalling Jackman’s Tony-winning turn in the 2003 musical “The Boy From Oz.” She notes that when she was visiting Sydney, she made a bunch of additional pilgrimages to the show there: “Six times in four days,” she boasts.

“Seeing Hugh is like going to church,” Cook explains, sitting in her homey Upper West Side apartment, chockablock with Native American and African pottery — another of her passions. “Because he is such a spiritual person. There’s no way you’d know this about him, but he’s one of the most profoundly good people I’ve ever known. He has a perfectly fine voice, but it’s about his willingness to show us who he is that is so moving. He allows himself to be so vulnerable.”

Cook has launched into a Jackman testimonial — hey, who’s winning the award here? — as she rhapsodizes about her good fortune in receiving the Kennedy Center Honors. She was hoping, she says, that Jackman would have been available to help fete her Sunday night, when the center tapes its annual, star-engorged tribute. Alas, Jackman sent word that he couldn’t leave his own show “Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway,” one of the fall’s hottest tickets.

Cook, who turned a gob-smacking 84 on Oct. 25, says she understood why he couldn’t make it, but she also wants to, ahem, clarify his appeal for her. “So many people say, ‘Oh, you’re in love with him!’ ” the singer observes. “I’m not in love with Hugh Jackman. ‘Oh, it’s because he’s so sexy!’ No, that’s not really it, either.

“Here’s the thing: What I try to tell students in master classes is what we want is them. It’s so hard to believe that what the world wants is the intrinsic you on the stage. And that’s what Hugh Jackman’s got, in spades. He’s incredibly present.”

The same, of course, can be said for Cook. With her immaculate natural instrument and the ebulliently permeable sense of self she projects in her concerts, she’s the empress of “present.” “Everybody’s on her team,” says Jessica Molaskey, the musical-theater actress who with jazz guitarist-husband John Pizzarelli developed a cabaret act, for which Cook has been a mentor. “She’s an exquisite musician, and she just happens to have the most shimmering luster. Her voice has a quality that shimmers. And I haven’t seen it go away.”

Jackman, for his part, considers Cook “the greatest living example of acting through song.”

“Her technique is extraordinary, and she allows me to forget that I am an actor, and to just be a fan,” he says. “I first saw her giving a master class in Melbourne, and, to be honest, I consider every subsequent performance that I have seen her in as a master class.”




Though the Honors more often than not go these days to artists of both achievement and a certain magnitude of celebrity, Cook’s overdue selection is not one being relied on to boost the telecast’s ratings. She’s from an even more rarefied circle of recipients, those who earn a coveted seat in the president’s box based essentially on their art alone. Having begun her career as an ingenue in Broadway musicals, she gravitated during a rocky midlife to a second act as an interpreter of show tunes and other standards — the concert and cabaret existence for which she’s now more widely recognized. Such an eternally fresh, expressive exemplar of the form is she that when the Kennedy Center decided to establish in 2007 an ongoing series of evenings featuring the nation’s best cabaret singers, it asked Cook to serve as its talent scout and curator.




Her durability, too, is a little bit freakish. How is it that a woman who made her Broadway debut in 1951 (in a flop called “Flahooley”) and is the resonant soprano on the original vinyl recordings of “The Music Man,” “Candide” and “She Loves Me” can in 2011 still be a supple source of musicality? Cook attributes her longevity to first-rate training: “In 1953, I got with the teacher who built my voice, Bob Kobin,” she says, sitting in her living room overlooking Riverside Park, seeming relaxed in black slacks and black turtleneck.

He instilled in her a comprehension that if properly used, the voice would last. “He used to say the vocal cords are among the strongest things in your body,” Cook says, adding that she’s a firm nonbeliever in wrapping the throat in scarves and all that pampering stuff. It’s learning how to manipulate the muscle that counts. “You can forget about hot tea and lemon, too,” she says, with a dismissive wave.

Anyone who’s seen Cook in concert would feel an immediate kinship with this disarmingly forthcoming woman in her art-filled home: She’s identical in temperament to the person on the stage who dips into the songbooks of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin. The candor with which she talks about herself — about the psychological cruelty she endured in her mother’s Atlanta home, her early struggle with the meaning of success and a subsequent descent into alcoholism — is of a piece with the entertainer who approaches her performances as acts of accessibility.

She’s open, too, about the opportunities missed, especially as they regard broadening her renown. (After two screen tests, she lost the part of Marian the Librarian in the movie version of “The Music Man” to Shirley Jones and since then has had a virtually nonexistent film career.) “It’s not that I wouldn’t have liked it,” Cook says, “but I think I’ve wanted to keep my life simple, and that has not always worked out in my favor. I would have been wiser to have fought more for TV and film.”



No one would confuse her concertizing for a confessional, but the absence of artificiality on these evenings has become a hallmark. Even in the potentially fraught predicament of dropping a lyric (which has been known to happen), she’s able to acknowledge, shrug off and metabolize the mishap. That’s, literally, the voice of experience.
“I’m more comfortable with who I am. I’m more comfortable on a stage. I’m more comfortable with putting myself in my work,” she says of the evolution of her life as a performer, during an afternoon-long conversation. “When you allow people to really, really see your humanity in its most profound form, it touches that humanity in them. In that critical way, we find we’re not so alone in the world.”

The confidence that comes with so pure an attention to rhythm and pitch — “She sings in the middle of the note,” marvels Molaskey, who appeared in Cook’s cabaret series with Pizzarelli — is no doubt an advantage to a singer seeking to cross emotional bridges through melody. For Cook, that translates into finding meaning in a composer’s original intent, rather than trying to improvise a new one.

“She serves the songwriter while being true to herself as a performer,” says Alexander Gemignani, a New York actor-singer who was flattered to have been approached by Cook to perform in her Kennedy Center series.

Her life and career have been based in New York for more than 60 years; she married and later divorced David LeGrant, who died several years ago; their only child, Adam, lives in Manhattan. And always, her work has revolved around the sounds she makes, from her earliest gigs, when she sang on bills with legendary groups such as the Weavers.



Along the way, she’s developed an appreciation of vocalists of eccentric range: Her enthusiasms include not only role models such as Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney, but also Jimmy Durante and Lady Gaga. The performer who made the deepest impression, however, was another celebrated cabaret singer: Mabel Mercer. All of these names are linked in Cook’s imagination by the gift she attributes to Jackman: evoking an authentically complete portrait of oneself through song.
She prizes this consummate ease above technique, though many of her idols had that, too. “When I saw Mabel, I bought what she sold immediately. I thought it was thrilling and exciting. And I wanted to do that.” Her inspiration, she says, “all came from Mabel — well, nine-tenths Mabel and one-tenth Judy Garland.”

In the midst of writing a memoir, Cook finds herself rummaging in some less tantalizing corners of her past. She traces a painful relationship with an overbearing mother to a horrible interlude: her sister’s death in childhood from whooping cough, an illness she’d overheard her mother say was contracted from Cook herself — which Cook had long taken to mean she had killed her sister.

About her drinking, Cook says it became a daily ritual for her, in the years after the juicy roles and Golden Age of Broadway musicals disappeared. “Let’s face it, I’d get drunk every night,” she says. And it continued for a spell even after she formed a professional partnership in the mid-1970s with Wally Harper, the composer and musical director who was instrumental in Cook’s rebirth as a concert singer. It was Alcoholics Anonymous that helped her get sober, and her flourishing cabaret life with Harper continued until his death in 2004.



Now, she says, she carries with her a vigorous sense of joy, whether for her own gigs or the performances of people she likes. “I read an article about Baryshnikov giving boxes of videos” of his dancing to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she says, “and he was asked why he didn’t sell them. ‘Selling my life? I do that in the theater!’ he said. That’s what I’m doing. I’m sharing with an audience my life, the good and the bad.”

The sharing goes on and on. This 84-year-old, for goodness’ sake, has just released a CD, “You Make Me Feel So Young.” And can’t get over being elevated to the Kennedy Center pantheon.

“I feel clearly that it’s a validation of my work,” she says. “And because I put my life into my work, I think it’s a validation of my life.”

[jo]

JoeD is from The NY Daily News.

[carouselkathy]

I saw her in the audience in Australia. She was a fan-girl all right! I also saw her in concert 4 times. While I was still teaching music, I attended a voice master class she taught. She was great with the young singers, getting them to interpret the songs, instead of just singing them. She was a great teacher as well as a great interpreter of song. Loved her!

[mamaleh]

Sad news. I remember she had to cancel a much anticipated perfornance at the New World theater complex last year owing to health concerns. She seemed to love sharing her affection for HJ and THE BOY FROM OZ with anyone of a like mind. She and I had a fun conversation during intermission at one performance at the Imperial. I was wearing my "I Love Oz" show pin. She saw me and said "Ooh, that's a great pin. I want one." I offered to give her mine, but she didnt want to deprive me of mine and simply asked where she might acquire one. I gave her the info, she thanked me and we talked about what a phenomenal, special person and entertainer HJ was.

We'd both seen the show many times by that point. She described how during the "Rio" number and curtain call she felt like she was "wafting on a cloud to heaven." I'll never forget those words--because I shared those sentiments.

Such a classy, super-talented lady. May she rest in peace.

Ellen

[ADMIN]

After scrolling though Jo's "Broadway Classics" thread I turned to the news and read that Barbara Cook died.





Now there is a true Broadway Classic! A truly beautiful ingenue (the original Marian the Librarian in The Music Man) with an amazing voice, she was a magnificent performer. I am blessed to have seen one of her birthday "celebration" concerts a Lincoln Center a few years ago - from the front row. Her phrasing and her "presence" were indeed exquisite.

Barbara Cook, a lyric soprano whose rousing songs and romantic ballads touched America’s heart in an odyssey that began in the golden age of Broadway musicals, dealt with alcoholism, depression and obesity, and forged a second life in cabarets and concert halls, died early Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

Adam LeGrant, her son and only immediate survivor, said the cause was respiratory failure.

In 2011, six decades after her Broadway debut in a short-lived musical, Ms. Cook received Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama. It had been a remarkable journey from a broken home in Atlanta to national renown as a singer who never learned to read music but became one of the finest emotive interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

While her voice had darkened over the years, critics said that even in her mid-80s it retained the richness, clarity and expressiveness of the Broadway ingénue she had been in 1957, when she rendered “Goodnight, My Someone” and a soaring “Till There Was You” as the original Marian, the librarian, in Meredith Willson’s blockbuster “The Music Man.”

Ms. Cook was an ideal leading lady in the musicals of the 1950s and ’60s. She was slender and blond, with a scrubbed schoolgirl charm and a radiant voice that ranged from the patter of comedy to the edges of aria. She won a Tony Award for “The Music Man” and starred in Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” (1956) and revivals of “Carousel” (1957), “The King and I” (1960) and “Show Boat” (1966).

She also appeared on Broadway in nonmusical roles, including “Any Wednesday” (1965) and Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders” (1967), and on television on dramatic anthology series like “Armstrong Circle Theater” and “The United States Steel Hour” and in a production of the Victor Herbert operetta “Babes in Toyland.”

Full NY Times article

[jo]

[jo]

www.broadwayworld.com/article/Broadway-Will-Dim-Lights-Tomorrow-in-Memory-of-Barbara-Cook-20170808

Broadway Will Dim Lights Tomorrow in Memory of Barbara Cook
by BWW News Desk Aug. 8, 2017  



The Broadway community mourns the loss of legendary actress and recording artist Barbara Cook, who passed away on Tuesday, August 8th at age 89. The marquees of Broadway theatres in New York will be dimmed in her memory on Wednesday, August 9th at exactly 7:45pm for one minute.

On Broadway, Ms. Cook is known for originating the roles of Amalia Balash in She Loves Me (1963), Marian Paroo in The Music Man (1957), and Cunegonde in Candide (1956). She also appeared in many Broadway concerts and specials including: Sondheim on Sondheim (2010), Barbara Cook's Broadway! (2004), Mostly Sondheim (2002), and Barbara Cook: A Concert for the Theatre (1987). Her additional credits on Broadway include: Enemies (1972), The Grass Harp (1971), Little Murders (1967), Something More! (1964), Any Wednesday (1965), The Gay Life (1961), Carousel (1957), Plain and Fancy (1955), Carousel (1954), Oklahoma! (1953), and Flahooley (1951).

"Barbara Cook was an unforgettable talent with a voice that dazzled audiences and kept them coming back over her 50-year career. With charisma, determination, and perseverance she made a remarkable contribution to theatre and inspired fans around the world," said Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway League. "She will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and colleagues."

In 1958 Ms. Cook won the Tony Award® for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Music Man. She received a second Tony Award nomination in 2010 for Sondheim on Sondheim. She was the recipient of many honors including the Theatre World Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Grammy Award.

[jo]

There were two big Broadway names who loved watching Hugh in TBFO.

One was Barbara Cook... who became a great friend to Hugh.

The other was the late Gerry Schoenfeld ( after whom a theatre was named) who led The Broadway League and the Shubert Organization -- Hugh said that he would walk down from the nearby Shubert offices to the Imperial a few times a week to watch Hugh from the side stage especially close to the finale. He loved Hugh as a performer and as a friend.

Now both are somewhere where they are probably chatting about the BOY FROM OZ experience


Jo

[jo]

I was wearing my "I Love Oz" show pin. She saw me and said "Ooh, that's a great pin. I want one."

Were you referring to the one with white and red rhinestones, with the "I*heart*OZ" message ( *heart* in red rhinestones) ?


I still have mine, too

It was one of the original members of the OFFICIAL TBFO forum who found that pin ( she said the supply was limited) -- it wasn't really meant for the show, but it had reference actually, if I remember right, to the Judy Garland ( now, there is also a connection there to TBFO) movie called THE WIZARD OF OZ. Or was it to Australia itself -- I can't remember anymore, but we definitely borrowed it for The Boy from OZ

When I saw The River, at the stagedoor I was wearing it on my coat and I proudly showed it to Hugh, with my leopard pin, to remind him of The Boy from Oz

Jo

[jo]

Someone reopened an old BWW thread paying tribute to Barbara Cook ( circa April 2010, when she was performing on SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM).


Look at my account there --

jo
Broadway Legend
joined:5/15/03
The Barbara Cook Appreciation Thread
#34

Posted: 4/6/10 at 7:58pm

Regrettably, I have never seen Barbara perform in person. But her singing is wonderfully appealing.


I would like to share two instances when I had an encounter with her. At the stage door of THE BOY FROM OZ ( she was a great fan of the show and Hugh Jackman, confessing to seeing the show over 15 times or so), we happened to cross paths and I couldn't help but tell her how much I enjoyed her duet with Michael Ball of PEOPLE WILL SAY WE'RE IN LOVE, sung for the Queen of England during a Royal Variety performance. She gave me a broad smile and said "Thanks" to acknowledge my compliment.

A few weeks later, we happened to be sitting two rows apart for the closing show of TBFO. During intermission, she talked to those of us within hearing distance and who sat closer to the stage than she did and said she would like to share with us some confetti and other stuff which we could all throw to the cast at curtain call. Out came her big Tiffany bag and she handed stuff to us for the final bow of the show!

I did not think I would ever see her again...but two years later, I went to Sydney to see the arena version of The Boy from Oz. During the Bicoastal moment, Hugh Jackman told us that there was someone in the audience whom he loves dearly and had there been no legal restraints ( copyright laws or something) he would have asked her to sing! It was Barbara - and that night would have been complete if she and Hugh had sang a duet together ( Maybe even PEOPLE WILL SAY WE'RE IN LOVE ?), with complete approval from his wife, who was Barbara's host for the evening!

Seven years later -- my memory cells are still current


Jo

[jo]

From a Playbill site compilation of her favorite performances --

Re The Boy from Oz and Hugh Jackman :

"I was so moved by this performance I went a number of times. The play begins, he moves down to center stage, opens his arms and lets you into his soul. Extraordinary!"

Jo

[mamaleh]

Aug 8, 2017 20:44:58 GMT -5 jo said:

I was wearing my "I Love Oz" show pin. She saw me and said "Ooh, that's a great pin. I want one."

Were you referring to the one with white and red rhinestones, with the "I*heart*OZ" message ( *heart* in red rhinestones) ?


I still have mine, too

It was one of the original members of the OFFICIAL TBFO forum who found that pin ( she said the supply was limited) -- it wasn't really meant for the show, but it had reference actually, if I remember right, to the Judy Garland ( now, there is also a connection there to TBFO) movie called THE WIZARD OF OZ. Or was it to Australia itself -- I can't remember anymore, but we definitely borrowed it for The Boy from OZ

When I saw The River, at the stagedoor I was wearing it on my coat and I proudly showed it to Hugh, with my leopard pin, to remind him of The Boy from Oz

Jo

Yes, that was the pin. I should have more properly indicated "I (heart) Oz." I always thought of it as the "show pin," even though I think it was more generically aimed at the country of Australia. What mattered, though, was the genuine affection we all--including honorary Ozalot Barbara Cook--(that's how I like to think of her) had for Hugh and the show.

Ellen

[jo]

The history of that pin was that Stephanie ( although she used a different user name on the TBFO Forum ) was looking around for items to be included in the first BC/EFA collection drive ( which she was coordinating with one of the ensembles, Matt) and found the pin in one of the stores around NYC. She thought it was a perfect reference to the show, although she was the one who told me that it was a souvenir, if I recall right, for THE WIZARD OF OZ (somebody else designed it for that purpose...but maybe never realized that it would bind some of us in a way to remind us of that great year of theatre-watching ).

Ahh... such fond memories. It is sad that one of us (Ms. Cook) who shared part of those memories is now gone.

Did you ever see her perform live, Ellen


Jo

[mamaleh]

Yes, at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. She was luminous, appropriate since she had the voice of an angel. She will be missed.

Ellen

[mamaleh]

I was in the theater district today seeing a matinee of PRINCE OF BROADWAY and decided to stay for the dimming of lights at 7:45 p.m. in honor of Barbara Cook. Nice tribute. A few of us standing across from the Imperial Theater as its lights dimmed applauded as tourists making their way to their 8 p.m. curtain looked at us uncomprehendingly.

Ellen

[ADMIN]

In Barbara Cook’s Final Days, Her Friends Came to Sing at Her Bedside
[This is so incredibly sweet. I'm getting all misty-eyed as I try to type.]


From left, Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat and Norm Lewis in the 2010 Broadway revue “Sondheim on Sondheim.” Ms. Williams and Mr. Lewis came to Ms. Cook’s bedside and sang to her before her death Tuesday.

In the days before Ms. Cook’s death on Tuesday, friends from her legendary career delivered a fitting farewell: More music. Vanessa Williams and Norm Lewis, who starred with Ms. Cook in the 2010 Broadway revue “Sondheim on Sondheim,” were among those who came by her Upper West Side apartment and sang to her. Josh Groban, Hugh Jackman, Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara and others sent audio and video recordings full of memories and melodies.

Ms. Cook was in and out of consciousness, able to recognize voices and respond with a squeeze of the hand.

“So often music can kind of connect in ways that just speaking can’t,” said Mr. Groban, the singer and recent star of Broadway’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” who sent an audiotape.

Mr. LeGrant, Ms. Cook’s son and an actor himself, described the bedside singing as “a beautiful moment.”

“I hesitate to say that it was something that only performers would understand,” he said. “It’s the giving of a gift that is very special because it’s how we communicate. To a fellow communicator, to give her something that they had all shared together, that was very special to them personally.”

Full article (have a hankie handy)