The Right Amount of Backing Makes a ‘Broadway’ Success

It’s amazing what a few extra strings and a horn or two can add to the already lush theater music of such composers as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein.

Their music received more than a little oomph over the weekend as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 105 members strong, served as pit band for a “Broadway’s Best” program at the Hollywood Bowl, headlined by composer-conductor Marvin Hamlisch and singer Barbara Cook. In these days of shrinking pit personnel and prerecorded or synthesized music, the sensitivity and complexity of a full philharmonic proved to be a Broadway lover’s nirvana.

Even so, the program didn’t always achieve its potential at Friday’s opening (the show repeated Saturday), due to awkward construction--particularly its let-down ending--and a couple of questionable choices of material.

First the good: Hamlisch, composer of “A Chorus Line,” wove songs by Porter and Kern into shimmering tributes, in his own orchestral arrangements, while, on the podium, he led the Philharmonic through the overtures from “Gypsy” and “Candide” with intelligence and verve.

Cook, who performed substantial sets in both the first and second halves, sang in a soprano nearly as lustrous today, at 72, as when she originated such roles as Cunegonde in “Candide,” Marian the librarian in “Music Man” and Amalia in “She Loves Me.”

And the program, overall, delivered surprise after surprise instead of the usual tried and true. Among Cook’s numbers, for instance, Rodgers and Hammerstein were represented by “It Might as Well Be Spring,” a lesser-known song from the movie “State Fair,” though perhaps the loveliest of all their creations. Jerry Herman, meanwhile, was represented not by anything from “Hello, Dolly!” or “Mame,” but by the haunting “Time Heals Everything,” from “Mack & Mabel.”

“It Might as Well Be Spring” proved to be one of the evening’s highlights. It is sung in the movie by a young woman yearning for romance, and Cook delivered its opening lines--”I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm, / I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string”--with an impatience that surged over the otherwise languorous, aching lines.

In their next selection, she and her musical director, Wally Harper, provided another view of romance by combining Rodgers and Hart’s “He Was Too Good to Me,” from “Simple Simon,” with Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” from “Follies.” Both are songs about love lost or never fully attained, and as Cook infused them with delicious, ecstatic pain, she made loss seem almost more satisfying than fulfillment.

Some of Cook’s other choices didn’t suit her, however. Rather than one of Marian’s songs from Meredith Willson’s “Music Man,” for instance, she attempted Harold’s “Ya Got Trouble.” Though she was word-perfect, her chipper, barely inflected delivery of this huckster patter came nowhere near the wicked gospel fire that the song requires.

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Still less successful was a lengthy medley of songs from “Porgy and Bess,” that wondrous idiosyncrasy of a show in which music by a couple of white guys, George and Ira Gershwin, sounds almost authentically African American. Though Cook began promisingly with a jaunty bit of scat singing, her tone remained too operatically crystalline to suit the earthy numbers.

From his own Broadway compositions, Hamlisch chose an overture for “A Chorus Line” (although the show itself doesn’t have one, because an overture would spoil its realistic re-creation of a Broadway audition), and “I Cannot Hear the City,” a bittersweet ballad from an upcoming stage adaptation of the movie “Sweet Smell of Success.”

As a closing number, though, the slow-tempo “City”--sung with sweet melancholy by Cook, while Hamlisch played piano--proved anticlimactic, and the Friday night crowd stampeded for the exits afterward, causing the performers to abandon a planned encore from “Oklahoma!”