Sing On! Sing On!, and she did!

One of the most beautiful voices on the stage today. Cornflower blue eyes that matched the stunning necklace she wore with her black ensemble. Angelic blond hair. She strode on stage to thunderous applause and proceeded to wow the packed house at the Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barington, Massachusetts. Her voice is a little lower but no less appealing, she is a good bit larger than her days as 'Marian the Librarian', but Barbara Cook is a hard act to follow. Oh, she's 83!

We were lucky enough to be in the front row for tonight's performance and I'm so glad we were. For an hour and a half Barbara Cook commanded the stage, backed by her very able trio. No 'Glitter and be Gay' anymore, but a wonderful repertoire of songs by an amazing panoply of composers. Her intense investment in each song was palpable. In one sad song by Alec Wilder, tears slipped down her cheeks. This is hard to fake on stage.

Her voice, now singing in a lower tessitura, still held that youthful beauty I remember when I saw her in The Music Man and She Loves Me all those years ago. Her patter was as intriguing as her singing. She lambasted Catherine Zeta Jones for her performance in A Little Night Music; a well-deserved criticism. I heard Jones sing 'Send in the clowns' on the Tonys and couldn't believe that she was given the award for best actress in a musical! As Barbara said: 'I have never seen so much acting going on on any stage!'. Acting but no singing.

Barbara Cook, on the other hand, is all about singing. It is rare to find a singer at 83 years of age who can convince you she is 23! But Barbara does it in spades.

Many of her songs were familiar show tunes but she also had chosen some really 'out-there' pieces, which she delivered with verve.

Needless to say, there was a standing ovation at the end of the show from the packed house. What is it that keeps us old timers coming back on stage? Yes, I place myself in the same generation as Barbara and I, too, am still performing. It's the love that floods over us from the audience as we stand there in a spotlight having done what we were born to do.

I wrote a book called Sing On! Sing On! some years ago. It is all about keeping one's voice beautiful and healthy right into what I now laughingly call OLD AGE. I doubt if Barbara ever read it, but she didn't need to. Here's to lots more years of hearing her sing as beautifully as she did tonight.

At one point she remarked that she has been told that she was a part of the Golden Age on Broadway. She said she didn't realize that at the time. She was too busy worrying about her hair and her figure. She said that when she looks back at pictures of herself from that era, she looked gorgeous. She then said ,'I guess when I'm a hundred and two, I'll look back at today and think the same thing.' No question!! Sing On...and on and on, Barbara!