Barbara Cook
b. 25 October 1927, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. This singer's performance was neatly described by one critic as ‘a style which marries a beautiful and undiminished soprano voice to nuance-rich phrasing and a skilled actress's emotional interpretation’. Cook's first professional engagement was at New York's Blue Angel club in 1950, where she sang mainly standards by the likes of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Rodgers And Hart. A year later she was starring on Broadway, as Sandy in the off-beat short-lived musical, Flahooley. In 1953, she played Ado Annie in a City Centre revival of Oklahoma!, followed by a national tour. The following year her performance as Carrie Pipperidge in another Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein, II revival, Carousel, gained her the role of Hilda Miller in Plain And Fancy which ran for over 400 performances. In 1956, she introduced Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur's Glitter And Be Gay in Candide, ‘the season's most interesting failure’ and, soon afterwards, played the lead in yet another New York revival of Carousel, with Howard Keel. The highlight of her early career came in 1957 when she appeared with Robert Preston in Meredith Willson's The Music Man, which ran for over 1,300 performances. In the role of Marion Paroo, the stern librarian, Cook excelled on numbers such as Till There Was You, Goodnight My Someone and Will I Ever Tell You. After gaining good reviews as a youthful Anna in The King And I at the City Centre, THE GAY LIFE (1961) gave Cook her most prestigious role to date, with a superior Schwartz and Dietz score containing Something You Never Had Before, Is She Waiting There For You? and Magic Moment. Two years later, Cook appeared in She Loves Me. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's score gave her the delightful Will He Like Me?, Dear Friend and Ice Cream among a double-album set. This was Cook's final major Broadway musical, although she did appear in the less successful Something More!, and The Grass Harp. She had been Broadway's favourite ingenue for 10 years and, for a while, continued to tour in well-received revivals such as Showboat (1966). She also appeared in several straight plays including Any Wednesday and Little Murders. In 1973 Cook starred in The Gershwin Years, celebrating the music of George Gershwin, and started playing clubs again, including the Brothers & Sisters in New York. In 1975, she made her concert debut BARBARA COOK AT CARNEGIE HALL and received a rapturous reception. The show was repeated in large cities throughout the USA. In 1976, she made her first visit to the UK, at the small Country Cousin club in London, where she had to compete with interference on the PA system from an adjoining taxi cab company. She was back at Carnegie Hall again in 1980 (IT'S BETTER WITH A BAND), with a programme which included some more contemporary material, along with the show tunes, and an item co-written by her musical director, Wally Harper, called The Ingenue (‘The parts for boys you play against, they bring out all the clones to do/And movie roles you live to play, they give to Shirley Jones to do!’). In 1985 Cook's career received an enormous boost when she appeared in two performances of FOLLIES IN CONCERT WITH THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC, along with other Broadway luminaries such as Lee Remick, George Hearn, Elaine Stritch, and Carol Burnett. She scored a personal triumph, with Stephen Sondheim numbers Losing My Mind, The Girl Upstairs, ‘Who's that Woman?’ and Buddy's Eyes. In September 1986 with her one-woman show, Wait 'Til You See Her, reached London's West End and was acclaimed by the critics and the public. In the following year, she was back on Broadway in A Concert For The Theatre, and continued to play other US venues such as the Ballroom, New York. A hiccup occurred in the UK in 1988 when she withdrew from the Royal Shakespeare Company's touring production of the Broadway-bound musical, Carrie, but she continued to delight London audiences into the '90s. Besides her performances on original cast albums, she has also appeared on several Ben Bagley albums and a 1987 recording of CAROUSEL, produced by Thomas Z. Shepard. On the latter she was joined by Sarah Brightman and opera singers, Maureen Forrester, David Rendall and Samuel Ramey, all accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.