Barbara Cook (pop vcl) Biography
25 October 1927, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. A celebrated actress and singer, with a style that, as one critic expressed it, "marries a beautiful and undiminished soprano voice to nuance-rich phrasing and a skilled actress' 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 offbeat, 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, Cook 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 Cook's 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 Marian Paroo, the stern librarian, for which she won a Tony Award, Cook excelled with numbers such as "Till There Was You", "Goodnight My Someone" and "Will I Ever Tell You?", and is reported to have been "devastated" when Shirley Jones played Marian in the 1962 movie version. 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 Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz score containing "Something You Never Had Before", "Is She Waiting There For You?" and "Magic Moment". Two years later, she 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", and was released on a double album. This was Cook's final major Broadway musical, although she did appear in the less successful Something More! (1964) and The Grass Harp (1971). She had been Broadway's favourite ingénue 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, after starring in a stage show entitled The Gershwin Years, Cook started playing clubs again, including the Brothers & Sisters in New York. In 1975 she made her concert debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, and received a rapturous reception that was repeated in large cities throughout the USA. In complete contrast, on her first visit to the UK in the late 70s she performed 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 that included some contemporary material along with the show tunes, and an amusing 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 the Stephen Sondheim numbers "Losing My Mind", "The Girl Upstairs", "Who's That Woman?" and "In Buddy's Eyes'. In September 1986, her one-woman show, Wait "Til You See Her, reached London's West End and was acclaimed by critics and public alike. In the following year, she was back on Broadway in A Concert For The Theatre, for which she received a Drama Desk Award, and continued to play other US venues such as the Ballroom, New York. Also in 1987, on a recording of Carousel produced by Thomas Z. Shepard, she was joined by Sarah Brightman and opera singers Maureen Forrester, David Rendall and Samuel Ramey, and accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. A hiccup occurred in the UK in 1988 when Cook withdrew from the Royal Shakespeare Company's touring production of the Broadway-bound musical Carrie, but she continues to delight international concert and cabaret audiences well into the new millennium. Her show, Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim, was performed in 2001 at the Lyric Theatre in London, and was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Entertainment. In 1994, Cook was inducted into Broadway's Hall of Fame.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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