Barbara Cook sings 'Mostly Sondheim'

NEW YORK, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- Barbara Cook, a darling of Broadway for 50 years, has taken her hit one-woman show to Lincoln Center for a limited run after a sold-out engagement in London, and there isn't a ticket to be had for love nor money.

Cook is performing "Barbara Cook in Mostly Sondheim" on Sundays and Mondays through Feb. 11 at the Beaumont Theater where the Tony Award-winning "Contact" is playing the other nights of the week. The entertainer's 90-minute show proves, as Elaine Stritch's recent one-woman show did for her, that Cook is still very much here, to quote a song from Sondheim's "Follies."

At 74, Cook is more rotund than she would like to be, but her face still has its dimpled ingénue prettiness and she has never changed the flip pageboy style of her blond hair. But it's the voice that really counts and Cook's is better than ever, still fresh in its purling beauty and with a new richness in the lower range and an emotional expressiveness that comes only with maturity.

Her top range is a few notes lower than it used to be, as she acknowledges that from the stage when she remarks, "I have to admit I give that B natural a little more thought than I used to," after singing the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick song, "Ice Cream." She introduced the song on Broadway in the original 1963 production of their musical, "She Loves Me"

If you can't get a ticket to see Cook at the Beaumont, the next best thing is to get her just released recording of the show on the DRG label, made last February when Cook tried out "Mostly Sondheim" in a concert at Carnegie Hall. It's even better than the 1975 recording of her Carnegie Hall "comeback" concert after a bout with depression and alcoholism, a collector's item in today's market.

"Mostly Sondheim" is a program of songs by Sondheim from several of his Broadway musicals mixed with songs by other composers that he listed several years ago as songs he would like to have composed. It's a clever idea and works perfectly for Cook whose career after Broadway has been mostly concert and cabaret.

The barn-like Beaumont is too hollow a space for a show that should be intimate in the nature of a club entertainment, but its lack of stage proscenium does push Cook forward toward her audience and a hand mike helps her voice reach the upper levels of the theater. She sings her last number, "The Trolley Song" from the movie musical "Meet Me in St. Louis," without the mike, and it is missed.

Cook avoids songs that "belong" to other entertainers and she said she wouldn't have sung "The Trolley Song" while Judy Garland, whose song it was in the movie, was alive. Her other songs from the pre-Sondheim era include "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun" from Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun," "I Had Myself a True Love" from "St. Louis Woman" by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and material by Arlen and E.Y. Harburg and Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields.

But the best part of the evening is when she gets inside Sondheim's songs, especially two melancholy love songs -- "Happiness" and "Loving You" -- from the composer's "Passion," a show of operatic aspirations that was less than a howling success on Broadway. Cook renders them so heart-rendingly that you want the show to get a second chance.

Other familiar Sondheim material is "Send in the Clowns," to which Cook gives an especially rueful accounting, "Another Hundred People (Just Got Off the Train)," "Everybody Says Don't," and "Anybody Can Whistle." She is especially effective in her wistful rendition of "Losing My Mind," a song sung by a woman driven mad by the memories of a broken love affair.

When Cook isn't singing she is regaling her audience in her soft southern drawl with bittersweet memories of a remarkable career that began in Atlanta, with voice lessons when she was 12. She made her first visit to New York with her mother when she was 20 and attended her first musical, "Oklahoma," deciding then and there to make music her career.

She got her start singing in supper clubs and finally was cast in a role in "Flahooley," a long-forgotten 1951 musical by Harburg and Sammy Fain. She followed this with Ado Annie in a national touring company of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "Oklahoma," returning to New York for a breakthrough performance as Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein's "Candide."

That led to such memorable roles as Marian the Librarian in Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," which won her a Tony Award, and Amanda Balash in the Bock-Harnick musical "She Loves Me," and to numerous roles in musical revivals including that of Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I."

In 1974 she and her pianist and arranger, Wally Harper, former a creative partnership that launched her in a new career in concert and cabaret across the United States and in London. She also became a teacher, giving popular master classes in the art of musical theater song at the Juilliard School.

Harper and bass player Jon Burr provide the musical accompaniment for "Mostly Sondheim.