Barbara Cook Memorial

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Theater

Bidding Adieu to That Wondrous Songbird Barbara Cook

By STUART EMMRICHDEC. 19, 2017

 

 

Photo

Barbara Cook at Carnegie Hall in 2012, at a concert celebrating her 85th birthday. Credit Robert Caplin for The New York Times

At the tribute to Barbara Cook at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on Monday night, a memorial for the Broadway and cabaret star who died in August at 89, friends and former colleagues recalled the high and sometimes low points of working with the gifted singer over her six-decade, roller-coaster career.

 

The lyricist Sheldon Harnick told of out-of-town tryouts for the 1963 Broadway musical “She Loves Me,” when he and the show’s composer, Jerry Bock, showed up one afternoon with a new song they had just written for their female lead. Ms. Cook read the lyrics, hummed a few bars and then said, as they looked at her incredulously, “‘Let’s do it tonight.’” That song was “

,” which Ms. Cook stopped the show with that night — “and then every night afterward,” Mr. Harnick recalled — and went on to make the signature song of her career.

 

Renée Fleming sang, “Hello, Young Lovers,” from “The King and I,” a show Ms. Cook performed in at City Center with the dashing Farley Granger in 1960, and repeated the advice Ms. Cook gave young singers, particularly those in the master classes she often taught: “You are enough. We are all enough. We are all always enough.” (Kelli O’Hara, who won a Tony Award for her own performance in “The King and I,” preceded Ms. Fleming with a gently sung version of “Make Someone Happy.”)

 

Audra McDonald remembered working as an usher at a Juilliard event so she could watch one of those master classes, sobbing as she sat on the stairs in the back of the theater. She then sang an ethereal version of “Go Back Home” from the Kander and Ebb musical “The Scottsboro Boys.” Several friends, as well as Ms. Cook’s son, Adam LeGrant, noted her late-night scouring of YouTube, looking for new material to sing; of her haunting Tower Records on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, eager to add to her opera collection; and, perhaps most surprisingly, her obsession with Hugh Jackman, particularly his performance in “The Boy From Oz,” which she saw 15 times.