Barbara Cook at the Kennedy Center

by Alan Greenblatt

It's been four decades and maybe 200 pounds since Barbara Cook gained fame as the original Marian the Librarian in "The Music Man." She never has become quite the Broadway legend that, say, Ethel Merman or Mary Martin were. She's devoted more of her career to concerts and made a fine appearance last Friday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall with the National Symphony Pops.

Cook is a great singing actress, making you feel the angst and loneliness of a classic torch song by Gershwin or Rodgers and Hart or even Stephen Sondheim without being maudlin for a moment. She was only a few days shy of her 73rd birthday, but her voice had lost none of its warmth or its remarkable light soprano sound, high without being screechy.

Cook appeals to a limited taste, I think, but she helped bring out some gay men to a concert hall otherwise filled almost entirely with grey hairs. The pops concept, as I understand it, is meant to present classical music in an accessible way in hopes of broadening the audience. The National Symphony appears to want to pander to the worst tastes of the people who already feel obligated to attend symphonic events.

The new conductor of the NSO Pops is Marvin Hamlisch, a Broadway composer of some note ("A Chorus Line," "They're Playing Our Song") who engages in unbelievably corny humor as host of the proceedings. I didn't think anything could top Bill Conti's conducting of the Memphis Symphony last spring for pure hokum, but how wrong I was. Hamlisch led the orchestra through several medleys, played some Nordstrom's background music style piano, and asked the audience to yell out titles so that he could improvise new songs on the spot. He even brought on a female impersonator (Barbra Streisand) who was actually fairly amusing.

Hamlisch conducts like your Uncle Freddy leading an old LP, flapping his right arm and pointing at people with his left. It was amazing how much more relaxed and swinging the orchestra sounded when Wally Harper, Cook's longtime accompanist, took over the podium.

By the way, I was amused by the gigolos and dolled-up old ladies who were there, sandwiched in my own calendar as they were between the ratted hair and black tee-shirt crowd Leon Russell had attracted the night before and the lederhosen people who performed in honor of Oktoberfest at Blob's the next night. With the strains of Heinrich and the Rheinlanders' closing rendition of "God Bless America" fresh in my head, I drove down U Street past many quite young black girls in high heels racing in groups between clubs, and thought, "Diversity, yay."