Так, дистрибьютеры DRG Records написали, что релиз диска "Барбара Кук в Метрополитене" переносится на 18 апреля.
А ведь до меня только дошло, Джош покорил последнюю американскую легендарную сцену - Метрополитен... Не говоря уже о том, что он большой поклонник Барбары и Суини Тодда
) и, как оказалось, это взаимно, полазила по ее сайту, столько хорошего о парне сказала еще года три назад...
Целиком неплохая статья, то что по теме выделила
))
Broadway legends of song and dance....
11:52I am currently in New York, where I arrived on Thursday afternoon and have already seen two of Broadway’s most beloved stars appearing in their own shows. First up, on my first night I caught Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (at the recently re-named Schoenfeld Theatre, formerly the Plymouth), a retrospective of the career of a Broadway “gypsy” who trained in ballet but got sidetracked into Broadway, aged 17, when she joined a touring company of Call Me Madam that starred Elaine Stritch, and never looked back. (“I was terrified of her,” she remarks of Stritch. “Still Am. Tell the truth — aren’t you?”) Rivera, who will turn 72 on Monday, made her Broadway debut in 1953 as a take-over dancer in Can-Can, when she was still billed as Conchita Del Rivero, but it was as Anita in the original West Side Story in 1957 that she indelibly came into her own and would become a major star in the Broadway firmament from then on.
The show that now celebrates all these achievements and more is handsomely produced but rather poorly constructed — it achieves neither the confessional rigour and intimacy of Elaine Stritch’s remarkable At Liberty three years ago, nor does it succeed simply as a showcase for her still vibrant talents, but falls somewhere between the two. Still, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and no fan of musical theatre would pass up the opportunity to catch up with her yet again. But there’s the problem for the show commercially: Rivera has really only ever had a career here on Broadway, and are there enough pure Broadway devotees to sustain this love-in? Alas, I fear not; audience figures are dwindling by the week.
Talking of Stritch — she’s also in town at the moment, performing her latest cabaret in the Cafe Carlyle, downstairs from where she lives in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side. She turns 81 the week after next, and also stopped by last night as an onstage guest to celebrate Barbara Cook’s historic elevation to the rare ranks of non-operatic artists performing their own show in the hallowed portals of the Metropolitan Opera House, at the House’s own invitation. Of course, with Cook’s (still) vibrant soprano, she could have had a career in opera; but luckily for us, just as Rivera could have ended up across the Lincoln Center concourse in New York City Ballet, she got sidetracked, gloriously, into Broadway. Throughout the fifties and into the early sixties — between the short-lived Flahooley in 1951 and She Loves Me in 1963 — she was the ingenue of choice; she subsequently took over in a long-running play, Any Wednesday, but then originated a flop play (Little Murders in 1967 plus two flop musicals (Something More! in 1964 and The Grass Harp in 1971) before she vanished for a few years.
Then she did something even more remarkable than what she had ever done on Broadway: in 1975, she took to the concert stage, making her solo Carnegie Hall debut. A new career was born, in which she became a sublime concert and cabaret interpreter of the American songbook. It was in the early 80s that I first encountered her in this new guise when she to London and appeared at the Donmar Warehouse.
She has been a regular visitor to London stages since, and I have been forever smitten. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times I have seen her on both sides of the Atlantic; when she last appeared in London two summers ago as part of a cabaret season at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, I wrote in The Stage, “As tears rolled down my cheeks during her thrilling rendition of Sondheim’s In Buddy’s Eyes, I thought that this may just be about the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in a theatre.”
Last night was an occasion for more tears and cheers. I have often remarked how the best kind of cabaret shrinks a room, of whatever size, and makes each and every audience member feel as if they’re being personally communicated with; and so it was once again last night, in the not exactly intimate surrounds of the vast Met (3,700 seats). Cook keeps the houselights partly up while she sings; she likes to see who she is performing to. She also performs without an interval; and as she held the stage for nearly two hours of uninterrupted, spell-binding bliss, I began to realise that this one of those legendary nights in the theatre that no one who was there would ever forget. It’s not that the repertoire was new — we’ve heard almost every single one of her songs before, though she has that rare gift for minting it afresh each time — but that here was the summation of a career in song that makes her one of the absolutely greatest singers of our time.
Everything was here: the still bright and shimmering soprano that dances over the notes with such vivacity; the effortless phrasing that caresses the lyrics and makes each word as clear as a bell, with every emotion expressed, too, with such feeling; above all, the transcendent humanity that puts it all together not just as a display of technique but more than that makes each song seem like peering into both its and her very soul. She loses the lyrics occasionally — it’s almost a Cook trademark — but we love her all the more for it: she’s human, after all — fallible — though with the voice of God. (When her MD prompts her on the lyric and gives it to her, she then says, “yes, but what’s the note?”)
Then there’s her phenomenal generosity of spirit. She shared this glorious celebration of her artistry with three guests, from three generations, who each did a solo turn and then a duet with Cook: her near-contemporary, the aforementioned Stritch (dueting up a storm together on The Grass is Always Greener from Woman of the Year); the sublime Audra McDonald (dueting on Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies, in a moment that felt very much like a torch being passed from one great singer to another);
; and then Josh Groban (doing a beautiful version of Sondheim’s Move On from Sunday in the Park with George together).
In a programme that featured Sondheim heavily — she is now the foremost contemporary interpreter of his work, since she gives it the emotional as well as musical weight it deserves — she could have been singing about her own talent and writing her own review in Not A Day Goes By from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along:
“But it only gets better and stronger
And deeper and nearer
And simpler and freer
And richer and clearer”