Barbara Cook brings her genius to town
“Singing is what I do,” Barbara Cook said. “I breathe and I sing. Sometimes I think of myself as the entire string section of the orchestra.”
There may be a holiday charm in the hinterlands to taking clients and coworkers to see marginal talent, but with Tony Award-winner Barbara Cook coming to town, Westchester County demonstrates that its borders very much embrace the thrill of the big time.
Cook, beyond a legend at 82, performs with the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra Dec. 20 at the Purchase Performing Arts Center (PAC) on the SUNY Purchase campus.
The voice is remarkably unchanged since 1958, when Cook debuted professionally. In November, The New York Times said, “You could easily create your own master class in singing standards by settling in with Ms. Cook”™s recordings.”
The December performance undercuts current supper club and cabaret prices (usually $75 per person).
When Cook began, the average price of a supper club cover charge was $25 and the average price of a ticket to a Broadway musical was $12.50.
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“Ticket prices were unusually low on Broadway for a long time,” said Jeff Berger, Cook”™s manager.
That was then. In 2003, “The Producers” crashed through the $100-per-ticket barrier.
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Long gone are the days when Broadway producers could produce a musical for just $250,000. Nineteen shows in the pre-recession 2005-06 season closed at a total loss of $96 million. The cost to produce a Broadway musical is now as high as $12 million.
“Just a couple of hundred performances on Broadway and you could get your money back,” said Berger of not-long-ago Broadway. “Today, ”˜Young Frankenstein”™ would have to run almost three years to pay off its investment.”
This spring, Cook will return to Broadway at Studio 54, in a new Stephen Sondheim and
James Lapine collaboration titled “Sondheim on Sondheim,” which she describes as a review of Sondheim”™s music. It is expected to cost $3.5 million before reaching Broadway.
Cook has seen the trend in Broadway musicals change. “People no longer want to see somebody recite dialogue and then break into song; Sondheim helped change that with ”˜Company,”™” she said.
She calls Sondheim “brilliant” and that”™s no surprise. She appeared at Carnegie Hall in 2001 in the acclaimed “Barbara Cook in Mostly Sondheim.” It was the smash hit of the London 2001 summer season eventually earning two Olivier Award nominations for Best Entertainment and Best Actress in a Musical.
Cook”™s “Mostly Sondheim” at Lincoln Center Theater sold out a 14-week run winning a Tony Award nomination for Best Theatrical Event. It has since been performed in major cities throughout the U.S. She has been called one of the greatest interpreters of Sondheim”™s work.
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Cook is a New York City resident who is equally at home in the concert halls of Europe. She recently returned from Ireland where she played the Grand Opera House in Belfast.
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She has no idea where her golden voice came from and said nobody else in her family ever sang. She was born in Atlanta and visited New York in 1948 with her mother. Cook decided to stay and to find work as an actress. She began to sing at clubs and resorts eventually earning a gig at the popular Blue Angel Theatre and Nite Club in Midtown Manhattan in 1950. Her Broadway debut followed in 1951 as the ingénue lead in the Yip Harburg musical “Flahooley.”
New York and national roles soon followed in the likes of “Oklahoma,” “Candide” and “Carousel.”
This led to two classic roles in the American musical theater: Marian the Librarian in “The Music Man,” for which she won the Tony, and Amalia in “She Loves Me” for which she received the Drama Desk Award.
In 1960, she took on the role of Anna in the legendary City Center revival of “The King and I,” her favorite role.
She also tried her hand at nonmusical roles, replacing Sandy Dennis in “Any Wednesday” and originating the role of Patsy Newquist in Jules Feiffer”™s “Little Murders.”
She left stage work in the ”™70s, to launch a second career as a concert and recording artist for which she is best known today. Her recordings include “Barbara Cook at Carnegie Hall,” a live recording of her 1975 Carnegie Hall debut, now remastered and re-released by Sony Records.
Her performing venues have included the Royal Albert Hall and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, and in the Big Apple, at Feinstein”™s, the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel, and the Carlyle Room in the Hotel Carlyle.
She became the first female popular singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in the company”™s more than 100-year history.