“Will
He Like Me”
Sheldon
Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963
Performer:
Barbara Cook from the original Broadway production
Sheldon
Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963
Performer:
Laura Benanti, in the 2016 Broadway revival
It’s
more than haunting that at the very moment I was listening to the tapes above
of Barbara Cook’s brilliant performance from the 1963 musical, one of my very
favorites, of She Loves Me—for me
almost a childhood icon, when at 16 I listened to the original Broadway cast
recording that I had bought nearly every day (I wore the record out and, a few
years later, bought a second copy)—Cook was already dead. I heard of her death
only later in the day. And, yes, I admit, I cried a good deal.
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 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 legend, a Broadway legend and cabaret-singer legend. 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 loved 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 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
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