Barbara Cook, Broadway And Cabaret Legend, Dead At 89

The classic Broadway ingenue of the 1950s and ’60s, she made her name as the original Marian the Librarian in The Music Man and Cunégonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. After a difficult period of alcoholism and weight gain, she reinvented herself as a cabaret star – one of whom no less than Stephen Sondheim said, “No one sings theater songs with more feeling for the music or more understanding of the lyrics than Barbara.”