| re: Barbara Cook Memorial | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 12:13 am EST 12/19/17 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 12:09 am EST 12/19/17 | |
| In reply to: Barbara Cook Memorial - Duke1979 08:25 pm EST 12/18/17 | |
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| I started typing this up earlier and was almost done and then I got a phone call. So now I'm posting it and others have posted in the interim, with the result that I'm repeating some of what others have posted. So forgive me. I don't feel like re-editing it now. It was wonderful and very moving. Sheldon Harnick started with a little story about being out of town with She Loves Me. He and Jerry Bock had just written "Ice Cream." They played it for Cook. She loved it, and she said, "Let's put it in the show tonight." They wondered if that would be possible. For one thing, could she learn it that quickly? She said that since she was supposed to be writing a letter, she could have the lyrics in front of her, and the melody was simple, and it didn't seem like the song would require complicated staging. They played it for Hal Prince and Don Walker. Walker said it would be simple to orchestrate and he could have it ready for that evening. So it went in that night, and stopped the show, and Harnick said she stopped the show with it at every performance after that. There were also very moving and funny reminiscences from Michael Kaiser, Jane Summerhays, Roy Furman, Frank Langella, and Adam LeGrant (Cook's son, which I imagine most folks here know but maybe some don't), as well as from most of the people who also sang. Those were Jessica Molaskey and John Pizzarelli ("I Got Rhythm"), Kelli O'Hara ("Make Someone Happy"), Renee Fleming ("Hello, Young Lovers"), Vanessa Williams and Norm Lewis ("So Many People"), and Audra McDonald ("Go Back Home"). There were video tributes from people including Sondheim and Hugh Jackman. There were also, as you may expect, videos of Cook performing and being interviewed. Among the former was something I did not know existed: Cook singing "Will He Like Me?" on TV. Unfortunately, that was a incomplete clip, far from the whole song. I was told afterward that it was from the Merv Griffin Show, and that she sang it while She Loves Me was in previews, but if the date on imdb is correct for Cook's only Griffin appearance, it was actually from before they left for New Haven. I wish they had showed that one complete. And there was a funny very clip from a short-lived soap opera she was on around 1954, titled Golden Windows. In the clip, she played a young woman about to sing in public for the first time, and she's talking to the main character of the series, another singer (played by Lelia Martin) who is more experienced, about how nervous she is to be singing in public. And Leila Martin's character tells her to think of one person to whom she would like to sing the song, and sing it for that person. And then we cut to Cook's character singing "Lover, Come Back to Me" very badly. It's not often you get to hear Barbara Cook sing badly (on purpose). She did it very well. There was a funny story from Summerhays about an email she received from Cook one night around 3 a.m. Cook was a night owl, which several people talked about. Anyway, Cook was in rehearsal for or perhaps soon to go into rehearsal for Sondheim on Sondheim. Cook wrote Summerhays that she had been given "I Read" to perform, and she was working on learning it. In the email, she went through every single meter change in song: one bar of this, one bar of that, one bar of this, three bars of that, one of bar of this, two bars of that. and so on. When Cook completed her list of every meter change in the song, she wrote, "What the fuck was he on when he wrote this?" (Perhaps a paraphrase, but pretty close.) She then wrote, as you might expect, that she loved the song and it was incredibly rewarding to work on it. Adam LeGrant told one particularly funny and cute story. He talked about his mother having a great appetite for everything, including food, something that he shared with her. He said that when he was young, they were on a trip to Berlin together. They were having dinner in a restaurant, and it wasn't very good. They were finishing or had finished their not-very-good meal when she said to him, "Would you like to go for another dinner?" So they found another restaurant, and had a second dinner, which was better than the first. I was so glad to be there for this. James Lapine is to be congratulated for putting it together so well. |
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