Barbara Cook
Singer who captivated audiences at full-throttle in Broadway musicals as easily as she seduced at cabaret clubs with smoky blues
BARBARA COOK, who has died aged 89, was a Broadway diva who enlivened the stage by sheer force of personality and vocal bravura; she appeared in a host of smash hit musicals – playing the fiendishly difficult Cunegonde in Bernstein’s Candide – before coming to London with her acclaimed one-woman show
(Wait ’til You See Her) at the Albery in 1986.
Barbara Cook was a singer in the best traditions of American musicals. Judy Garland had taught her how a song “should have an unbroken line” and, like Ethel Merman, Barbra Streisand and Liza Minelli, her phrasing was instinctive. Her delivery was masterly – she knew when to hold back and when to pull out the throttle and let rip. As a consequence she filled large venues with up-tempo numbers as easily as she seduced audiences at cabaret clubs with more intimate, smoky blues.
Her British fans got a glimpse of her exceptional talents when the BBC screened a relay of highlights from the historic concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 1965. Among a star-studded cast Barbara Cook sparkled incandescently. She also gave concerts at Carnegie Hall, where her vocal magic and ability to convey lyrics with an unremitting honesty marked her out as a rare and exceptional talent.
Barbara Cook was born in Atlanta on October 25 1927, 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 Fainharburg 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.
With a budget of $300,000, Candide was then the most expensive musical ever staged in New York and was criticised as “over-produced”. But what was never in doubt was Barbara Cook’s electrifying portrayal of Cunegonde. Dressed in a ball gown with large ruffles at the shoulder and wearing a heavily plaited wig, she stunned the audience with her singing of the coloratura aria Glitter and be Gay. It was a performance to treasure and was, luckily, preserved on disc.
Broadway that night started a love affair with Barbara Cook.
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 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.
After an appearance in the lacklustre Carrie (the RSC’S attempt to move into musicals) Barbara Cook became a regular visitor to London, singing at Pizza on the Park and at the Green Room in the Cafe Royal.
In July 1994 she returned to the big stage with a series of concerts at 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.
She continued to perform until June last year when she took to the stage, singing from a wheelchair, to promote the publication of her memoir Then & Now.
In the 1970s Barbara Cook had become closely associated with the works of Stephen Sondheim. In 1985 a concert version of Follies was put on, for two performances, as a vehicle to record the musical. Sondheim insisted that Barbara Cook play the role of Sally and sing the haunting number Losing My Mind.
Initially she was unavailable because of a prior commitment. But this was soon rearranged for, as Sondheim said at the time, “if we hadn’t had her it would have been our greatest disappointment. There is still only one Barbara Cook. And she brought something to the concert that is inexpressible.”
At both performances, when the cavalcade of Broadway stars (including Elaine Stritch, Carol Burnett and Lee Remick) came down the staircase, the audience exploded into applause. Barbara Cook’s singing of In Buddy’s Eyes was considered “harrowing” and was undoubtedly one of the concert’s highlights. “I did the whole show in a slight daze,” she said later.
Apart from the cast albums and recorded concert performances, Barbara Cook recorded prodigiously. Her discs devoted to George Gershwin and Jerome Kern are a worthy legacy of a remarkable artist.
Barbara Cook is survived by a son from her marriage to David Legrant.
Barbara Cook, born October 25 1927, died August 8 2017