my favorite broadway musical songs: “will he like me?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCzkqCh3-I
Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry
Bock (music) / 1963
Performer: Barbara Cook from the
original Broadway production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AarSccJPVlU
Sheldon
Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963
Performer: Laura Benanti, in the
2016 Broadway revival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrENWITA6_U
Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry
Bock (music) / 1963
Performer: Audra McDonald, singing
at the London Palladium / PBS Television
Cook, after all, had been a significant figure, as I write elsewhere,
for so many years in my life, from 1957 on, through her performances of my
home-state’s The Music Man and
Bernstein’s brilliant Candide through
She Loves Me and into a new life (and
a new body) in which Howard and I enjoyed her in, first gay bar cabarets, and
later in beloved video productions of Follies
and more immediate theatrical productions in Los Angeles in Westwood and
Beverly Hills. Who couldn’t love that now overweight singer who performed
nearly operatic feats while telling such wonderful tales of her own life? Cook
was a legend, both on Broadway and later in cabaret and stage. She had it
all—and she knew it. She had done everything, and done it so brilliantly that
no one could do anything but love and admire her if you enjoyed the genres in
which she had appeared.
She sang so many songs so brilliantly that it seems almost a sin to
describe the pleading Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock ditty “She Loves Me” as
the first of many works I will later describe coming from those incredible
lungs. But her performance is so amazing that it is impossible to ignore it.
I recently listened to the same song, performed in a revival by the
quite talented Laura Benanti, who I had first seen and was very impressed by in
a revival of Gypsy and later enjoyed
enormously in the very underrated Broadway musical, based on Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
But the differences between their performances are notable. Benanti sings the
Harnick-Bock song very nicely and credibly, but far too filled with surety.
From the very first chord, Cook, who had a voice that might have brought
down the angels to the dust of the earth, sings with such a tremulous sense of
fear and insecurity that you couldn’t even imagine that this then, thin, almost
emaciated singer, could have easily belted out her song to the very back levels
of the balcony.
Will he like the girl he sees?
If he doesn't, will he know enough
to know
That there's more to me than I may
always show?
Will he like me?
She pleads, terrified by the meeting
with her letter-correspondent, who just a few songs before has excitedly sung
of their meeting at eight.
She pleads, furthermore, with the audience that she is a woman who might
not be able to express her depths:
Will he know that there's a world of
love
Waiting to warm him?
How I'm hoping that his eyes and
ears
Won't misinform him
She is terrified of his judgment, so much so that she is ready to cancel
her appointment. It is almost painful for the audience to hear and see that
this beautiful woman, with whom Georg Nowack, the shy assistant manager of
Maraczek's Parfumerie, has been corresponding, is also frightened about their
evening appointment.
Yet Cook, in her singing, takes this song to new limits, the plea
becoming a kind a pleading song not with
her not-yet-perceived lover, but for an complete engagement with the audience,
wherein her soaring lyrical arpeggios totally convince us that she is more than
worthy of the unknowing Georg’s love. Benanti sings the final pleading notes of
this desperate song of acceptance with a full-throated demand:
Will he like me?
He's just got to
Cook, instead, pauses, aspirates the final words, “He’s just…..got to”
to create a suspense upon which depends the entire rest of the tale. Yes, he
does “got to,” since she’s so impossibly loveable given her singing, but her
own fears are voiced so beautifully that we, too, wonder, will Georg really see
her inner beauty, really hear her lovely voice? It’s a dilemma, given her own
hostility to the real workaday situation, that is expressed totally in the
voice. And Cook is able, time and again, throughout this musical to convince of
her inner beauty through her voice. Music, in this lovely tale of a Hungary of
another time and place, is crucial. If you can’t hear Cook’s vocal message, you
may not possibly comprehend the lovers’ attraction to each other. There is no
question, given Cook’s singing that “He’s just got to.”
Los Angeles, August 8, 2017
Reprinted
from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (August 2017).
