Free Then and Now by Barbara Cook Page A

equally happy for me, but it’s a visit that I remember chiefly because it was the only time my father said anything negative to me about my mother: “Nell is her own worst enemy.” That’s all he said. This was a big trip for my father, because he’d had a heart attack right after I moved to New York in 1948; although he recovered from that and could still work, he was never quite the same. But he wanted to see me in the show, and I remember the two of us having dinner at a steakhouse I used to go to with Herb Shriner. I felt grown up, but oh, I was so young and inexperienced. I felt I was living out a scenario from one of my favorite movies—young girl, determined to make it in New York, lands a big role in a brand-new Broadway musical. She’s discovered and stars in a big smash hit. There was just one problem with that scenario: this wasn’t a smash hit. Or a small hit. It was a complete flop.
    I had actually been unsure of how the show would be received. I knew it was a strange show, but out-of-town audiences had liked it. Now, however, I was about to learn the lesson that there are always two different shows: the show that the audience sees and the show that you’re in. When you’re performing you are standing inside the show and there is no way to be objective. You can’t judge the quality of the show because you’re not seeing it. People talk to me about Candide , and I have to say, “I never saw Candide . I saw where I was but I never saw the show Candide .”
    When you’re in a show you lose perspective. It’s inevitable and happens as soon as you’re immersed in rehearsals. I did a tiny bitof directing once and I was shocked at how quickly I lost perspective. I did see The Music Man , because I went to see it when I was on vacation from the show, and it was quite a revelation. When performing in the show I could never figure out why audiences loved the counterpoint of “Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You?” so much, but when I watched the show I really understood. Oh, that Buffalo Bills quartet that sang “Lida Rose” was terrific—a real barbershop quartet—and Meredith Willson’s soaring melody for Marian (my character) on “Will I Ever Tell You?” provided the perfect contrast. Watching from the audience allowed me to see how genuinely crowd-pleasing the music and staging were.
    Flahooley , however, was another matter entirely, because it didn’t run long enough for me to ever take a day off and see the show. I remember standing in Times Square at midnight reading the opening-night review in the New York Times ; Brooks Atkinson, the most influential of all critics at the time, called the show “a tedious antic with no humor or imagination at the heart of things,” which seems a strange criticism for a show which in retrospect seemed to suffer from, if anything, too much imagination. Just to make sure no one missed his point, he added: “The plot is one of the most complicated, verbose and humorless of the season.” Brooks Atkinson was a first-rate critic, someone who really cared about theater—he would follow people’s careers and try to help them. He liked actors, which is not always the case with critics; but his review obviously spelled big trouble for us.
    Some critics were charmed by the show’s whimsy: John Chapman in the Daily News described it as “a tuneful, extraordinarily beautiful and delightfully imaginative musical.” He also homed in on its political aspects, writing that “it may alsobe the most elaborately coated propaganda bill ever to be put on a stage.”
    Whether a propaganda bill or not, it wasn’t onstage for very long. With the reviews skewing toward the negative, audiences in New York reacted much less enthusiastically to the show than they had out of town and we closed on June 16th, after just forty performances. We did record the cast