Barbara Cook: Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You

Barbara Cook and I go a long way back—dare I say it?—together. Actually, there are two Barbara Cooks, perhaps even two and a half, as I'll explain anon. There is the thin Barbara Cook who was a musical-comedy star in the '50s and '60s, and the stout Barbara Cook, who became a top cabaret singer, still is one at age 80, and can, as far as I'm concerned, go on forever.

The half-Barbara Cook, a straight dramatic actress, figured intermittently for a few years. For example, she replaced Sandy Dennis in Any Wednesday in 1965, and played Kleopatra in Maxim Gorky's Enemies in 1972 at the Vivian Beaumont. It was then that, to my lasting regret, I reviewed her as follows: "Barbara Cook is a musical soubrette whose loss of voice is presumed to have increased her straight acting ability, and whose emotional outburst at her husband's murder might just win a prize for Allegiance-to-the-Flag recitation during National Girl Scout Week." More about this half-Barbara and half-baked Simon in a minute.

Somewhere in the mid-1970s, the stout Barbara Cook, cabaret singer, triumphantly blossomed. Believe me, not every thin woman has inside her a fat woman aching to emerge. And so, the miracle. The lovely, delicate, almost wispy young singing actress, whom I loved in such shows as Plain and Fancy, Candide, Carousel, The Music Man, The Gay Life and, perhaps most of all, She Loves Me, as Amalia Balash—so much so that I even forgave the show's faulty Hungarian: Balash ought to be Balázs.

That ethereal creature turned into the current, Wagnerian-sized Barbara Cook, whom, despite my predilection for sylphs, I love just as much as a Walkyrie. When and how did my conversion to the latter-day Barbara occur?

It was in 2002, when I attended Mostly Sondheim, her concert appearance at the Vivian Beaumont. I was enjoying her singing and patter alike; suddenly, she quoted the first half of my review of her Kleopatra in Enemies—not as an enemy, but as a revered artist gently mocking and majestically forgiving an errant critic. I recall my reaction: shame at having been so wrong, and a bit of guilty pride at my pasquinade being remembered with such amused grace. There are not that many performers, thick or thin, from whom a Christian soul yearns to come out pardoning an unjust review.

[IMG:R]Finally I realized (30 years too late) that here was a true greathearted artist of whom it could be said, as of that other Cleopatra, that "age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/her infinite variety" in songs of every kind, with a mike or, as she would demonstrate at the end of her concerts, without.

Subsequently, if we ran into each other, it was friendly, and I tried to catch as many of her performances as I could, and glowingly reviewed her on disc. Even now, as an octogenarian, she has a voice slightly darkened but still agile, consummate delivery, and the knack to act out compellingly a song's meaning. Nor has her patter lost its charmingly self-mocking wit.

Which brings me to her current stint at the Café Carlyle, entitled Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You, named after one of the mostly snappy love songs constituting her show. As bad luck would have it, a prior commitment prevented me from making the critics' preview; so I couldn't get there till March 7, a hideously rainy Friday that didn't prevent the space from being packed, or the crowd from having a raucous good time.

It being a weekend night, the management could provide my wife and me only with a table right next to the drummer. From where I sat, somewhat behind him, the sound system seemed to have a slight echo effect on the voice, or such part of it that—no fault of the good Jim Saporito—managed to hurdle the obstacle.

Even so, I could tell that the show (largely newly added and jazzier numbers, like "Cooking Breakfast for the Man I Love" and "Hallelujah, I Love Him So") was a hit; that the three-man band, led by the terrific pianist-arranger aptly named Lee Musiker (who also works with Tony Bennett), was doing just fine; and that Barbara's patter was as droll and revealing as ever. And, in the end, there was once again a song in the unmediated, naked voice, with equal sweetness as that of the first Barbara, overleaping the years of singer and listener to where fresh-minted beauty would be preserved—by discs, memory and legend—as Barbara Cook, the immortal.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.