When You Need a Good Cook
I think I posted this years ago, but I came across it by accident the other day, and does it ever bear repeating. It comes from The Bell Telephone Hour, a truly wonderful sort-of variety show that would do high-end classical music and popular music and devote a full hour to a theme and more.
This comes from 1960 and features Barbara Cook who created the role of ‘Marian the Librarian’ in the The Music Man three years earlier. She’d had a good career on Broadway before that, including as ‘Cunegonde’ in the original production of Candide, though that show only ran for 73 performances. A year later, she got hired for The Music Man, and it brought her to great fame. (It ran a wee bit longer – 1,375 performances, over four years.) However, although Robert Preston famously re-created his starring role in the movie version, Cook didn’t get the chance to repeat hers. Which brings us to the The Bell Telephone Hour.
This is a seven-minute medley of songs from The Music Man with Barbara Cook. Though she sang some of her Music Man songs later in her career in concert, this may be the only video of her performing as ‘Marian’ sort of in context, not only close to the run of the musical, but actually during the run (though I’m guessing she’d left the show by that point.) Making it even better, the barbershop quartet that comes in later is The Buffalo Bills, who starred in the original production and repeated their performance in the movie.
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