Lyric soprano Barbara Cook, a much-sought-after ingenue during Broadway`s golden era, never has considered herself a superstar ”in the Mary Martin, Carol Channing or Ethel Merman” tradition. Yet the 61-year-old musical actress is winning great reviews these days with her honey-sweet voice and simple, laid-back one-woman show.
Her performance ”is the closest we`ll ever get on this planet to hearing an angel sing,” wrote one ecstatic critic during Cook`s extended performance at the Kennedy Center, where she packed in fans young and old, including President Bush and his wife.
But Cook confesses that she went through a prolonged ”middlesence,” a
”sort of middle-age adolescent period of readjustment,” before finding a fitting new, ”mature” role for herself on the concert and cabaret stage.
Cook was a tremendously popular musical actress during the 1950s and
`60s, known for her stunning performances in ”The Music Man,” ”Plain and Fancy,” ”Candide,” ”Carousel” and many other hit shows.
”And then, in the late 1960s, I realized I was no longer right for the youthful, ingenue roles I had been playing, and I had to sit back and think things out and take a new approach.”
From the late 1960s to the early `70s, the Atlanta-born actress took fewer and fewer roles.
”It was a very difficult time for me,” she recalls. ”I know men go through `middlesence,` too, but this is a particularly tough period for women in the theater. You begin to think, `Oh, God, I`ll never work again.` ”
”There`s a lot about going from middle-age to senior-citizen status that`s just a pain,” she laughs, ”but there`s a lot of good about it, too. You have real perspective, for instance, the kind you can`t get until you`ve been around a while. And you have wonderful friendships. A five-year friendship just isn`t the same as a 30-year friendship, and that`s really valuable stuff.”
