Singer Barbara Cook Still Packs Heartfelt Emotions Into Her Songs

From her Broadway debut in 1951 until 1975 when she did her last original musical on the Great White Way, Barbara Cook had been celebrated for her ability to quietly and simply deliver the power of a song.

Composers and lyricists as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur, Meredith Willson, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick all wrote songs to showcase her clear, soprano voice. And she won roles as coveted as Cunegonde in the musical of “Candide” and Marian the Librarian in “The Music Man.”

Cook, who tonight opens a three-week concert engagement at the Westwood Playhouse, may not have had Barbra Streisand’s force of personality or Rita Moreno’s fire on stage, but the heartfelt emotions Cook put into a song could bring an audience to tears or laughter.

“I think I always had this enormous need to communicate,” she said over breakfast at a Westwood hotel. “I don’t know why it is, but I look at an audience and have to let them know how I feel about something. And the only way I can do that is through how I sing a song.”

The surprise is that her seemingly inborn ability to convey a song did not come naturally. Indeed, she doesn’t feel she had succeeded at that until the end of her Broadway years, shortly before she began a new phase of her career on the concert stage and in clubs.

“It took a long time to get what comes out in a song equal to the emotion I put into it,” she said with a laugh. “It took a long time to make it equal, or at least almost equal.”

Cook began her career as a child in her hometown of Atlanta where she performed with amateur theatrical troupes and sang on the radio. She arrived in New York in 1948, one of countless ingenues looking for a big break. A friend of a friend of her mother’s knew a telephone operator at Irving Berlin’s publishing house, and that connection got her a chance to perform “for a big guy in the company,” she said.

“I sang ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ and I was scared to death, of course,” Cook said.

His reaction was totally unexpected.

“He said, ‘You have a very pretty sound,’ ” Cook recalled, “ ‘but you don’t have any feeling behind it.’ I was shocked. I had always so much feeling when I sang. I didn’t understand why he didn’t hear that.”

Cook started to learn about putting emotion into a song from two masters--Mabel Mercer and Judy Garland. From Mercer, who was the queen of the club scene and talked her songs as much as sang them, Cook learned the importance of clearly conveying the content of every lyrical phrase.

Garland normally sang for the public in far larger venues than clubs, but Cook found a way to observe her up close too. “Sometimes she would go at night to a private club called the Gold Key Club. I knew a guy who played piano there, and he would call me and say, ‘She’s here.’ Inevitably she would sing just for her own pleasure and I could watch.”

What she learned from Garland was to look at the song as a whole. “It’s the long arc of the song that she did so well, the shape of it,” Cook said. “She taught me that one moment must logically follow another. You had to know where you were going.”

Three years after Cook arrived in New York, she had the lead in the Broadway musical “Flahooey,” a now almost-forgotten comedy that also featured self-declared Incan princess Yma Sumac. It was not a hit, but Cook quickly moved on to a national touring company of “Oklahoma” and revivals in New York of “Carousel” and “The King and I.” In 1955 she starred in the new musical “Plain and Fancy,” followed the next year by “Candide” with music by Bernstein, and then in 1957 came her biggest hit, “The Music Man.”

No matter how the shows fared, Cook usually got rave reviews, and for “The Music Man” she won a Tony. But through it all, Cook still did not feel that she was getting enough emotion into her performance. “We would record the songs for the cast album and I would just be amazed,” she said. “I would feel so much when I sang. I could not understand why it was not coming through.”

It was not until 1971, when she was doing the musical “The Grass Harp,” based on a novel by Truman Capote, that she felt she finally hit her stride in putting across a song. “I have no idea why it happened, but when that show was recorded, it was all there for me,” she said. “I could hear just what I had put into the songs.

“My only guess is that it was because a lot of time had passed since I had started. A lot of life had happened to me. A lot of ‘I don’t give a damn’ had gotten into me, but not in a bad way.

“It was that I could finally be satisfied to just put me into a song and let the chips fall where they may. People could either take it or leave it, but all I really had to offer was me.”

“The Grass Harp,” which was not a big hit, was Cook’s last new show in New York. Musicals were becoming scarcer and the mostly sweet, innocent musicals Cook had done were becoming practically extinct. She did a few serious plays and teamed up with musical arranger Wally Harper, who will accompany her at the Westwood Playhouse, to begin a concert career that has taken her all over the United States and to many foreign countries.

Just before coming to Los Angeles she did six weeks at the famed Cafe Carlyle in New York. She was last here in 1990 when she appeared in concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.

Cook’s concert career has also brought changes to her singing style. “I think probably the biggest adjustment was that she had to also sing in a more rhythmic way,” said Harper, who has worked with Cook for 18 years.

“When she was on stage the songs she would do, such as ‘Till There Was You’ in ‘The Music Man,’ would mostly be very lyrical, rooted in operetta.

“Now, when she does a song like ‘Come in From the Rain’ in her concerts, it has to be much more jazz-influenced. She had to work hard to switch gears.”

Cook’s show at the Westwood Playhouse will include both the songs Harper mentioned, plus “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Look to the Rainbow,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Change Partners” and many others.

Her only sojourns back to the stage in recent years were a partly staged concert performance of “Follies” in 1985, with an all-star cast, and a disastrous musical adaptation of the Steven King thriller “Carrie” at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England in 1988. (Cook disassociated herself with the special-effects filled “Carrie” after it played in England, citing artistic differences with its creators. The show went to New York, where it was an expensive flop.)

Cook has become used to the freedom of choosing her own songs, in consultation with just her musical director instead of a large team of musical creators. And after all these years of appearing in concert, she said she has gained more confidence to expand her repertoire and find new ways of singing a song.

“It’s a little more frightening, because you are not singing a song as a character,” she said. “You are putting your name on it. You are making the choices, without the restrictions of how someone in a show might have to do it. You put yourself on the line.”

But that doesn’t mean that Cook wouldn’t like to return to her first love, musicals, given the chance. “When I did ‘Follies’ it really whetted my appetite for doing a show,” she said. “You do lose some freedom, but there is also something wonderful about working within a framework with all those other people. There is nothing like it.

“I would love to do another show.”

Barbara Cook’s concert show, with musical director Wally Harper, opens at 7 tonight at the Westwood Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. The show continues Tuesdays through Sundays until Dec. 6. No performances Nov . 23-25. Tickets range from $22-$28. Call (310) 208-5454.