'Mostly Sondheim' carries sweet tune home

For Broadway legends, one need not look further than College Street, where Barbara Cook sings Mostly Sondheim at the Shubert Theater. Cook, a showbiz veteran and Broadway Hall of Fame inductee, brings out the full power of Stephen Sondheim, one of the most influential composers of American musical theater. From her opening song, "Everybody Says Don't," to her closing ballad, "Anyone Can Whistle," Cook treats her audience to an evening of delightful singing and non-stop fun.

Cook has a talent for bringing the entire audience into her world, treating everyone like lifelong friends. Immediately after introducing herself, for example, she asked that the house lights be turned up so she could see the crowd.

Barbara Cook is a fantastic soprano. Her voice has aged well and seems to hit high notes effortlessly, although she assured the audience this wasn't the case. Half the pleasure of Mostly Sondheim is watching her perform— Cook's beautiful, natural expressions effortlessly control the audience's emotions. Her rendition of "Ice Cream" from She Loves Me drove the crowd into hysterics, and her "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music brought tears to audience members' eyes.

The show consists of pieces by Sondheim and songs "he wishes he had written." The latter runs the gamut from classic Broadway showstoppers like Irving Berlin's "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun" from Annie, Get Your Gun to Milton Ager's Heart-Hearted Hannah. Brilliant lyrics unite all the pieces in the program. Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh's "When in Rome, I do as the Romans Do" manages to find multiple rhymes for every Mediterranean locale: "When I'm in Italy/And I lie to you prettily/Don't think of me bitterly," and so forth.

But Sondheim, of course, is no novice wordsmith. In his younger years, he wrote crossword puzzles for the New York Times, and consequently has a vocabulary rivaling that of the Oxford English Dictionary. He can rhyme like none other—"You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from Company features ingenious lyrics like "When a person's personality is personable/he should-n't oughta sit like a lump/It's harder than a matador coercing a bull/to try to get you off of your rump."

Cook is the quintessential "Broadway Ba-by." Among her many credits, she originated the roles of Cunegonde in Candide and Marion in The Music Man, for which she won a Tony Award. She played Ado Annie in the original cast of Rodger and Hammer-stein's Oklahoma, a show which defined the modern musical.

Coincidentally, Fla-hooey, Cook's first appearance in a musical comedy, was at the Shubert. The theater also hosted the world premiere of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim's first Broadway musical for which he wrote both the music and the lyrics.

Cook and Sondheim are masters of their crafts, and for that reason, Mostly Sondheim soars. Cook is what every singer aspires to be, and Sondheim possesses unrivaled brilliance. With talent like Cook and Sondheim, this is a night of astounding theater.

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