A Broadway legend at the Mahaiwe

Submitted by Lesley Ann Beck on August 12, 2010 - 7:08pm

Tony Award-winner Barbara Cook, whose extraordinary singing voice has been called "a natural wonder," will perform at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on Sunday, August 15, at 7 p.m., in a concert that will include show tunes from her remarkable Broadway career, as well as standards, songs by Stephen Sondheim, and some surprises.

In a short telephone interview last week, Ms. Cook shared some of the plans for her Mahaiwe performance. “This is a concert that I could do either in an intimate venue or a larger theater. There will be several Sondheim pieces and a lot of songs people know and some they don’t know but I hope they’ll enjoy.” The evening will be a “mixed bag,” she says, including songs by Berlin, Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

At the Mahaiwe, Ms. Cook will be accompanied by Andy Einhorn on piano—he was the conductor for Sondheim on Sondheim—and a bass and drums. “Some of the tunes,” she says,” are kind of swingy.”

Ms. Cook won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for creating the role of Marian the librarian in The Music Man. The award, she says, is kept in the dining room on the bookshelves. And this year, she was nominated again for a Tony for her performance in Sondheim on Sondheim. She also has won Grammy and Drama Desk awards and has been inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame.

Barbara Cook made her Broadway debut in 1951 in the musical Flahooley, and then proceeded to portray Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, Carrie Pipperidge in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel and Hilda Miller in the original production of Plain and Fancy. She created the role of Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and played, among many other roles, Amalia in the musical She Loves Me, Anna in The King and I, and Julie Jordan in Carousel.

As Cunegonde in Candide, Cook sang “Glitter and Be Gay,” a song that was a signature one for her for many years. She doesn’t sing it anymore, and “now I don’t think there’s one [song] in particular” that audiences expect her to perform. She does believe she has become more associated with the work of Sondheim, expecially after the success of the recent Sondheim on Sondheim. “His songs are so actable," she says. "There are little scenes in them. I think he explores the human situation more than just about anyone else.”

Looking back for a moment at her many illustrious years in the theater, she doesn’t think performing on Broadway has changed all that much. “I loved working on the show [Sondheim on Sondheim] with the group; it was a rewarding experience. I’ve missed that.” Cook doesn’t recall when she first met Sondheim. “I think we met in the 1950s. I’ve known him for ages.”

She says the New York audiences were “wonderful for the Sondheim show; the most consistently wonderful audiences I’ve seen. They love Stephen and love his work.”

After her Mahaiwe appearance, Cook will be performing at the Regency in New York with Michael Feinstein for the month of September, with concerts in Toronto and Virginia to follow. “I’ll be traveling around.”

For now, though, Ms. Cook is coming to the Berkshires to sing at the Mahaiwe; she has performed at Ozawa Hall several times in the past. “I don’t come often enough,” she says.

PHOTO BY MIKE MARTIN

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