Obit: Musicals Actress Barbara Cook (1927-2017)

Subject: Obit: Barbara Cook, Oct. 25, 1927 - Aug. 8, 2017
From: Vashta Nerada
Date: 08 Aug 17 - 02:31 PM

New York Times obituary for the spectacular Barbara Cook.

Barbara Cook, a lyric soprano whose rousing songs and romantic ballads touched America's heart in an odyssey that began in the golden age of Broadway musicals, dealt with alcoholism, depression and obesity, and forged a second life in cabarets and concert halls, died early Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

Adam LeGrant, her son and only immediate survivor, said the cause was respiratory failure.

In 2011, six decades after her Broadway debut in a short-lived musical, Ms. Cook received Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama. It had been a remarkable journey from a broken home in Atlanta to national renown as a singer who never learned to read music but became one of the finest emotive interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

While her voice had darkened over the years, critics said that even in her mid-80s it retained the richness, clarity and expressiveness of the Broadway ingénue she had been in 1957, when she rendered "Goodnight, My Someone" and a soaring "Till There Was You" as the original Marian, the librarian, in Meredith Willson's blockbuster "The Music Man."

The rest is at the NYT link - they're good about making durable links to their stories and obituaries.

Subject: RE: Obit: Barbara Cook, Oct. 25, 1927 - Aug. 8, 2017
From: keberoxu
Date: 09 Aug 17 - 01:39 PM

New York critic John Simon was very nasty when he reviewed Barbara Cook's cabaret act year ago. Well, that puts Ms. Cook in the best of company, no doubt.

Leonard Bernstein made her his original Cunegonde in "Candide" -- that brilliant coloratura aria with the devil-may-care high notes. High-octane operatic sopranos sing that role now. Barbara Cook was nothing like one of those; but it was Leonard Bernstein himself, and she said that, for him, she could do practically anything.