Kate Baldwin Takes On The Story Of A 230 Year Marriage With ‘Love Life’
Nellie Forbush, Dolly Levi, Anna Leonowens, Marian Paroo—and now, finally, Susan Cooper.
On Broadway, Kate Baldwin has done a modest handful of roles—like a Tony-nominated turn as Sharon McLonergan in the 2009 revival of Finian’s Rainbow—but she is best known as the go-to singer for a gargantuan gallery of musical theater heroines. How many that could be, she hasn’t a clue.
“I turned 50 this year,” she tells Observer, “and I’ve been doing them for 28 years. I lost count a long time ago.” One role, however, she is positive she has never performed is Susan Cooper.
That chore awaits her March 26-30 when she and Brian Stokes Mitchell co-star in the next Encores! offering at New York City Center, Love Life, often cited as one of the first concept musicals.
“I was overwhelmed by the scope of what the plot was attempting to cover,” Baldwin admits. “In 1948 when the show was first done on Broadway, it went back 150 years. Our version takes it up to present time, and that makes it 250 years. We start in 1791 with the birth of the nation and the start of the marriage of Sam and Susan Cooper, who struggle to cope with the changing social mores of the times. They never age as a couple from all of this, but the country does.”
Baldwin is comfortable within the confines of her character. “Susan starts out very peppy in her own little cocoon of marriage and family life,” she says. “Then, the outside world—the shifting landscape of American society—starts to tear her family apart. She responds to this by reaching out and questioning. She doesn’t shrink from changes. She embraces them. She wants what she wants, all of it—a job and a loving relationship with her husband. This is the modern woman of 1948.”
In this role, Nanette Fabray won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical (the second ever presented, after Mary Martin’s Nellie Forbush), but in her later years she had no memory of the award or the role—the result of a severe concussion she suffered when she was knocked to the ground by a spooked elephant during the filming of 1978’s Harper Valley PTA.
Love Life, a love story played against churning historical events, is the one and only teaming of Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner. Producer Cheryl Crawford suggested this unexpected pairing to give Lerner a break from his sputtering early collaboration with lifelong partner Frederick Loewe (they created at different speeds). Working with Weill helped remedy that situation.
Love Life opened during a period when a musicians’ union strike led to disputes in the recording industry. As a result, Love Life—as well as Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?—received no official cast album. But a couple of Weill’s numbers (“Here I’ll Stay,” “Mr. Right”) did manage to penetrate the hit parade, and Lerner reworked one set of lyrics (“I Remember It Well”) for Gigi.
“The score is full of exciting variety,” says Baldwin. “There’s a ballet in it, there’s an aria in it, there’s beautiful madrigal singing and incredible vaudeville numbers. Weill’s melodies are outstanding. They’ve lived five years in my subconscious, since we first looked at them in 2020.”
Lerner once told Weill’s widow, the singer Lotte Lenya, that he wished he loved his book and lyrics as much as he loved Weill’s music. “He was only about 27 years old when he did Love Life,” Baldwin points out. “And Weill was not young at all. He’d already done Lady in the Dark and Street Scene. He died a year after Love Life in 1949. His last score was Lost in the Stars.
“According to Weill Foundation officials, Love Life was beloved by both authors. They wanted to continue to work on it and figure it out. Lerner said toward the end of his days that he wanted to rewrite and do it again. I feel like we’re giving them the opportunity now with this Encores!”
The director of this edition is Victoria Clark, who usually wins Tony Awards as an actress (The Light in the Piazza, Kimberly Akimbo). “I trust no one more,” Baldwin says. “She comes from a performance background and thinks first as an actor. She has a holistic approach to the piece.”
Originally, Love Life was scheduled as part of the 2020 season of Encores! but the performances were cancelled as a result of the pandemic shutdown. “When we rehearsed it five years ago, we had one run-through on the City Center stage—that was March 12, 2020,” Baldwin recalls.
“What was exciting about that day was that one got to see the disparate parts of the show, all the big production numbers that didn’t involve Sam and Susan Cooper. I got to see all these numbers for the first time. Theater scenes were being rehearsed in one corner, the vaudeville numbers were rehearsed in another room, and the ballet was being rehearsed downstairs.
“Finally, we got to see the whole show put together. If you think about it, we didn’t now at the time when we’d perform it. We thought we were going on a hiatus for maybe two weeks, maybe a month, at the time. We had no idea how long it would be. When we finished that one run-through, we crossed the street for pizza and wine. And now, here we are five years later.”