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Barbara Cook and Audra McDonald team up at NJPAC. Plus: James Mitchell recalls the filming of Oklahoma!

Barbara Cook and Audra McDonald at NJPAC(Photo © Michael Portantiere)
Barbara Cook and Audra McDonald at NJPAC
(Photo © Michael Portantiere)

A PAIR OF QUEENS

It’s wonderful to see musical theater performers of two different generations working together on stage, but the joy of such occasions is usually mitigated somewhat by the fact that the veteran artists’ resources are diminished with the passage of time. Happily, that doesn’t apply at all to the great Barbara Cook, who’s still singing magnificently in her late 70s. So the recent teaming of Cook with the brilliant, much younger star Audra McDonald in a concert at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Saturday was as satisfying musically as it was emotionally.

Though the bulk of the generous program consisted of solo sets by the two ladies, they did team up for a few numbers — and the crowd loved it. In fact, the evening began with Cook and McDonald harmonizing beautifully in a duet version of “Frere Jacques” into “Sing” (by Joe Raposo), performed in the terrific arrangement by the late Wally Harper that Cook has been doing for years.

McDonald announced to the audience it was a “humongous honor” for her to be sharing the stage with Cook. In her solo sets, she retraced familiar territory, singing terrific songs by Jeff Blumenkrantz, Jason Robert Brown, and Michael John LaChiusa as well as a couple of standards: “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star Is Born (no, not the Streisand version!) and “When Did I Fall in Love?” from Fiorello. Cook’s solos included “A Wonderful Guy” and “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific, “The Gentleman is a Dope” from Allegro, “It’s Not Where You Start (It’s Where You Finish)” from Seesaw, and “In Buddy’s Eyes” and “Losing My Mind” from Follies. In addition to their opener, the ladies duetted on Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” Kander & Ebb’s “The Grass Is Always Greener” from Woman of the Year, and a patriotic medley ( “Of Thee I Sing,” “God Bless America,” and “America the Beautiful”) that made their point about the need to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq without delay better than any speechifying would have done.

Though there were few surprises in the program, it was great to see and hear these irreplaceable artists together on the stage of NJPAC’s gorgeous Prudential Hall. I’m happy to report that the sound amplification was quite sufficient yet unobtrusive, which is often not the situation in other concerts in other venues. (Cook allowed us to judge the large hall’s acoustics with her unplugged encore rendition of “We’ll Be Together Again.” They’re excellent.) Eric Stern and Ted Sperling served as musical directors/pianists for Cook and McDonald, respectively. David Rataczak drummed for McDonald, while her husband, Peter Donovan, played bass for both ladies. (“We’re sharing him tonight,” McDonald quipped.)

By the way: I ran into some friends from New Jersey at the concert, but the Manhattan contingent in the audience seemed very small given the singular nature of the event. I’m sure that many theater-loving NYC residents avoid trips to NJPAC because they’re under the mistaken impression that it’s a hassle to get there. On the contrary: Newark is less than 45 minutes from midtown Manhattan on the PATH train, and the fare is a mere $1.50 each way. Once you’re reached the train station in Newark, the theater complex is only about 15 minutes away by foot — or you can take a shuttle bus, if you prefer. Here’s another tip: Within a stone’s throw of NJPAC, there’s a fabulous Spanish restaurant called Don Pepe, which offers great service and tremendous amounts of delicious food at extremely reasonable prices. Go early and make a whole evening of it.

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James Mitchell(Photo © Joseph Marzullo)
James Mitchell
(Photo © Joseph Marzullo)

DREAM CURLY

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the dream ballet “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind” as seen in the 1955 film version of the epoch-making Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! I don’t think the sequence really works in the context of the picture because the use of dance doubles for the roles of Curly and Laurey is jarring; so is the fact that the ballet was obviously filmed on a sound stage, given the literal nature of film and the outdoor photography of so much of the movie. On the other hand, it’s an invaluable treasure to have a record of the Agnes de Mille choreography that set Broadway on its ear when the show opened at the St. James Theatre in 1943, even if de Mille altered the staging somewhat for the cameras (see below).

Directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Gloria Grahame, Gene Nelson, and Charlotte Greenwood, Oklahoma! has just been re-released in a two-disc DVD edition that actually includes two completely different movies: the Todd-AO version and the Cinemascope version. Believe it or not, each and every scene was filmed and printed twice because the studio didn’t think they could convert the larger Todd-AO images to regular 35mm film stock. The ballet looks and sounds spectacular in both formats. After watching it, I phoned James Mitchell, who danced the role of “Dream Curly” in the film half a century ago and is still vital and handsome today at 85 (see photo), to ask about his memories of the experience.

“We did have to film everything twice, but that wasn’t particularly difficult,” Mitchell told me. “We did it so many times in rehearsal that it didn’t make much difference.” According to Mitchell, “de Mille did the editing of the ballet. I don’t know if she or Zinnemann had the final cut, or if they worked on it together, but she was definitely involved. Almost everyone who was in the dance had done it before on stage, one place or another, and/or they had worked with de Mille before, so they knew her style. She reconstructed and revised the dance for the larger space and the new sets — for example, the barroom scene with Jud. It was the same choreography as the stage version, but re-spaced.”

Mitchell was one of the few dancers in the ballet who hadn’t appeared in any stage production of Oklahoma! This was also the case with Rod Steiger, the highly respected “method” actor who played Jud in the film proper and in the ballet sequence rather than yielding to a dance double, as Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones yielded to Mitchell and Bambi Lynn. Recalls Mitchell, “Steiger asked to be in the ballet, and he was strong enough and could move well enough to do it. So he was the only non-dancer in it. Jud doesn’t have much actual dancing in the ballet anyway; it was just basically picking me up, throwing me around, and looking mean.”

As noted above, the bulk of Oklahoma! was filmed on location (though not the actual location!) in Arizona and New Mexico; but, according to Mitchell, the ballet was filmed on an MGM sound stage in Hollywood. “It was a very pleasant experience,” he reminisces. “It took several days to do it because it was quite complicated, but there were no real difficulties.”

Well known to daytime TV viewers as Palmer Cortlandt on All My Children, Mitchell made several films before Oklahoma!, both musical and non-musical. He danced with a young Rita Moreno in The Toast of New Orleans (1950) and, more famously, played choreographer Paul Byrd in The Band Wagon (1953). Does he enjoy watching the old flicks now? “No, I don’t like it at all,” he replies without hesitation. “I’ve never seen The Band Wagon; it was a miserable experience, so I didn’t go to see it. Even the movies I did enjoy making, I don’t really like to watch myself. It’s not much fun. But when I do, sometimes I’m surprised. I was pretty good!”