The Songbirds Archives

The Champion Season: A Salute to Gower Champion
DRG Records (DRG 91458), U.S., 1999

Reviewed by Alfred Zelcer (New York City)

I have always wanted to live in Barbara Cook's voice. I listen to it, I think of mohair softly draped on a linen duvet, covering fresh cotton sheets on an oak sleigh bed, the whole thing sun-dappled by early morning light, while a Russian coffee-cake rises from a nearby oven. It's a nurturing voice that can convey innocent joy as sincerely as innocence betrayed. Alas, on record, the beautiful voice can also grate while on its way to an upper register. But with her latest recording, Cook seems to have found a way to circumvent this, creating a seamless journey between warm and well-rounded chest tones and the matching tonalities that now carry effortlessly into her higher notes

This latest collaboration between Barbara Cook and pianist-composer-arranger Wally Harper isn't titled "Directed by Gower Champion," but that would be the more accurate description for this package that mines material from the shows Champion directed. Champion and wife/dance partner Marge appeared extensively in top supper clubs and in major variety shows on television in the early 50s. They also put time in Hollywood making five films before returning to New York, where the two separated professionally, allowing Gower to become one of the leading directors during the last golden gasp of the American stage musical in the 1960s.

Cook kicks off this live recording with a wistful transposing of a Bye Bye Birdie song to read: "I love you Gower, oh, yes I do. / I love you Gower, and I'll be true. / When you're not near us we're blue. / Oh, Gower, I love you." With her singular built-in quiver, even something that reads this bad in print comes off as touching introduction to a line-up of unexpected and predictable selections from composers associated with Champion's productions, including one of Annie Get Your Gun, which, as Cook announces with a twink in her voice, "gives us the perfect right to do… Irving Berlin."

Champion’s 1977 Los Angeles production starred Debbie Reynolds, which Dan O'Leary's liner notes erroneously date to the early 1950s. What might be perceived here as forced intrusion from a little known production of a very well-known show, is instantly defused by the ravishing way Cook and Harper delve in the nuance within I Got Lost In His Arms and They Say It's Wonderful, bringing these iconic songs to a surprising level of fresh, emotional urgency.

Cook's always scrupulous phrasing and total commitment to the story behind the words, burnishes Her (His) Face to a radiant glow. Bob Merrill's song from Carnival is a gem, rising magnificently out of decades of neglect, and can easily be imagined traveling the voices of Shirley Horn, Wesla Whitfield and others. Another gem unearthed, Among My Yesterdays from Kander and Ebb's The Happy Time, is added as eloquent proof that musical treasure need not always come out of the vaults of 100-year old composers.

Paired with I Got Lost in His Arms, Time Heals Everything, which Cook calls "just likely the finest song Jerry Herman ever wrote," brings on full-force the heated yearning she effectively generates with dramatic theater ballads, even if Before the Parade Passes By can't quite pass muster. Brought out for a climax, this Hello Dolly show-stopper that can now only be described as show-weary, rings the only cliched note in the program.

Champion also tore up vintage stage and film scores to suit his vision in at least two instances. From one of these comes I'm Always Chasing Rainbows by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Carroll (by way of Chopin), presented in less-is-more fashion, and adding the poignant pleasure of a rarely performed verse. This song is included by way of another Debbie Reynolds showcase, the 1972 production of Irene, which also happened to feature three new songs written by the show's conductor, Wally Harper. One, The World Must Be Bigger than an Avenue, gives Cook a chance to turkey-trot with the sass of early-century days, assisted by the always elegant and often surprising ministrations of her longtime musical partner Harper.

From another augmented score, the Broadway version of the film 42nd Street, comes Warren and Dubin's About A Quarter to Nine. Cook includes tales of the unreal theatrics surrounding Gower Champion's death just hours before the curtain went up on opening night, and of producer David Merrick's derailed paranoia around previews and the press, tales even the plot of 42nd Street dared not invent.

It’s not surprising that Champion's favorite song was a theater song: They Were You, Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones' melancholy waltz from The Fantasticks, and Cook wisely offers it as a closing selection, a fitting reflection of a gifted theater man who trafficked in musical high standards, and whose heart for the theater was, from every indication, one he was willing to sacrifice.

Tracks
1. We Love You, Conrad (Gower) (Strouse, Adams) / Before the Parade Passes By (Herman) / It Only Takes a Moment (Herman)
2. I Got the Sun in the Morning (Berlin)
3. The Happy Time / Among My Yesterdays (Kander, Ebb)
4. The World Must Be Bigger than an Avenue (Harper)
5. I'm Always Chasing Rainbows (McCarthy Sr., Carroll)
6. About a Quarter to Nine (Warren, Dubin)
7. Her (His) Face (Merrill)
8. Look What Happened to Mabel (Herman)
9. They Say It's Wonderful (Berlin)
10. I Got Lost In His Arms (Berlin) / Time Heals Everything (Herman)
11. Before The Parade Passes By – reprise (Herman)
12. They Were You (Schmidt, Jones)

DRG Records