Streisand: Her Life (119 page)

It wasn’t only the stage design that set this tour apart from
Timeless
. Barbra’s song choices were more eclectic; she sang a number of songs she hadn’t performed live in decades, if at all: among them were her own composition “Ma Premiere Chanson,” which she played on the piano for a bit before singing (and apologizing to the audience for her limited piano skills); “A Cockeyed Optimist”; “Funny Girl” from the film; “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” from the stage version. Fans were astonished that, at 64, Barbra sounded almost exactly as she had on the original cast album, and when she sang “My Man” she held the top note at song’s end without waver or pullback.

In the second act, after singing “The Music of the Night” with Il Divo; “Children Will Listen”; “Unusual Way”; and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”, she took questions from the audience by way of cards that they filled out in the lobby before the concert. One request was that she sing “Stoney End.” She expressed surprise at the song’s enduring popularity, then gave a truncated though energetic performance.

Barbra ended the show with rousing renditions of “Somewhere” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” both of which had audiences on their feet.

The one controversial part of Barbra’s show was a comic sketch with a George W. Bush imitator being dumb (he proposes cutting the national debt by selling Canada and says, “If I cared about polls I would have run for president of Poland.”). The election was less than a month away, and Barbra must have felt that the skit might sway some people to vote for the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Most of Barbra’s fans share her political views, but not all do, and the skit caused several unpleasant incidents. On October 30 in New York (a blue state!) some audience members jeered the skit. Barbra responded angrily, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up? If you can’t take a joke, why don’t you leave and get your money back?” Audience cheers drowned out the protesters. Barbra later apologized for her outburst: “I shouldn’t have lost it.”

Another problem arose in Sunrise, Florida, when someone threw a glass of water at her at the end of the skit. Barbra later told the
Chicago Tribune
arts critic Howard Reich that the man—who was escorted out of the arena—hadn’t even paid for his ticket. “That guy was a friend of guests that I had.” She had invited the crew of a friend’s yacht to attend, but one of them got sick and gave his ticket to the man in question. “No good deed goes unpunished,” Barbra said with a laugh. She said she felt that the man wasn’t making a political statement by rather was drunk and having a fight with his wife.

Despite sketchy reports of slow ticket sales at the outset,
Billboard.com
reported that Barbra’s tour set box office records. The twenty concerts grossed $92,457,062 and set house records in fourteen of the sixteen arenas played. In the other two arenas, Madison Square Garden and the MGM Grand, she already held the venue record.

Barbra’s goal of raising money for her causes was spectacularly met. She donated $11 million from the net proceeds to the Streisand Foundation for its charitable distributions. The first million dollar donation from these funds was a contribution to the William Jefferson Clinton Climate Change initiative. Another $5 million was donated to the Cedar-Sinai Women’s Heart Center as an endowment funding the Barbra Streisand Women’s Cardiovascular Research and Education Program.

On May 8, 2007, Columbia released the two-CD recording
Barbra Streisand: Live in Concert
. It rose to number seven on the
Billboard
chart, but despite that has yet to reach Gold status. Two years later, on April 25, 2009, CBS aired the Florida concert. 4.98 million viewers tuned in. And three days later, Sony released a DVD set of this concert, the 1994 show at Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, and the special on her Broadway album,
Putting It Together
. The package rose to number one on
Billboard
’s DVD sales chart.

When the announcement came that Barbra would be taking her latest show to the U.K. and Continental Europe, fans there were ecstatic. Many had paid dearly to come to America to see her last three major concerts; this time it wouldn’t be quite so expensive. “What a joy it will be to perform in so many wonderful countries for the first time,” Barbra said. “I can’t wait to experience these different audiences and different cultures.”

Between June 18 and July 25, 2007, Barbra brought her stage and her musicians for single dates to Zurich; Vienna; Paris (where Barbra was awarded a medal of the Legion of Honor by France’s president Nicholas Sarkozy); Berlin; Manchester, England; Dublin; and London for three sold-out shows. She had to cancel scheduled shows in Stockholm, Rome, and Nice, for various reasons. For this tour she replaced Il Divo with four male singing stars from Broadway (Peter Lockyer, Michael Arden, Sean McDermott, and Hugh Panaro), and she tinkered with her song list and patter to accommodate each new city.

The European tour proved a mixed commercial success. Several of the cancellations were reported to have been because of lack of ticket sales. If this is so, it might be a result of ticket prices being too high (in Rome there were vociferous protests about the prices) or the fact that Barbra’s popularity is not the same in every country. Still, the tour made a lot of money, and afforded Barbra and her fans “across the pond” a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I
n the summer of 2009, Barbra announced that on September 26 she would play one night at the Village Vanguard, an intimate club on Seventh Avenue South in Manhattan to promote her upcoming album,
Love Is the Answer,
a collaboration with the popular jazz artist Diana Krall, the wife of Elvis Costello. She enlisted Richard Jay-Alexander again as director, and he explained why she chose this very small venue. “The reason Marty [Erlichman] had his eye on this particular club was because it is the only venue of its kind still standing and in business from the era during which Barbra began singing in clubs like The Lion and the Bon Soir, which no longer exist.”

Barbra held a raffle in which lucky fans could win one of the very few available tickets to the performance. (The remainder of the seats were for her family, colleagues and friends.)

The day before the performance, Barbra rehearsed with the band and the director. “The band shows up for the first time,” Jay-Alexander wrote, “having rehearsed the ‘set’ of songs the prior day at a rehearsal studio and prepping more songs than we need, awaiting Barbra’s final choices, after a rehearsal.” The pianist, Tamir Hendelman, was pleased with the amount of rehearsal time. “We spent 20 minutes to half an hour for each song,” he said. “We played them through, talked about what kind of flavor we wanted to give it. So by the time Barbra joined us, we didn’t really need to talk about the music, since it was already there, and other things needed to be talked about at that point—you know, the lighting, this and that. But the music really flowed. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

Around 7 p.m. the night of the concert, buses arrived carrying the lucky fans who won the ticket lottery. Celebrated friends of Barbra’s entered the club closer to show time: former president Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; their daughter Chelsea Clinton and her fiancé Marc Mezvinky; James Brolin; Sarah Jessica Parker; Nicole Kidman; Phyllis Newman (who beat out Barbra in 1962 for the Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical); Alan and Marilyn Bergman; mogul Barry Diller; Frank Rich of the
New York Times
; Deborah Lee Furness, the wife of Hugh Jackman; Columbia Records head Rob Stringer; manager Sandy Gallin; and Tommy LiPuma, who produced
Love is the Answer
with Streisand and Diana Krall, which was scheduled for release three days later.

The show began at 8:10. After an “overture” of “Cry Me a River,” Barbra came out of her dressing room and walked through the audience to take the stage. She wore a black sequined pantsuit with a dark brown camisole-style top and was greeted by a raucous standing ovation. On the stage waiting for her were a chair, a small round table with a single pink rose in a vase, her eyeglasses, a note card, two lozenges, and tea in paper cups, which Barbra would raise to toast the audience with before she sang “Here’s to Life,” the first song on the album. A large TelePrompTer was set up for her in the back right of the room near the entrance door.

“This is hysterical,” she said with a laugh as she stepped on the small stage to join her musicians—Handelman on piano, Jeff Carney on bass, Brian Koonin on guitar and Ray Marchica on drums. “Are we a box of sardines here or what? I haven’t sung in the Village since 1962. And after everything I’ve done and everywhere I’ve been, I’m back to where I started. Life is a circle, right? So, this is where I was. And this is where I am now.” A little later she said, “It’s hard to have stage fright when there’s hardly any stage!” (The club was so small, in fact, that a live video feed was sent to the Louis XVI suite at the Waldorf-Astoria so that some of Barbra’s family, Columbia Records employees, and former New York Mayor David Dinkins, among others, could watch the performance.)

After “Here’s To Life,” Barbra sang seven other songs on the album: “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Gentle Rain,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” “If You Go Away,” “Where Do You Start,” “Make Someone Happy” and “ Some Other Time.” She also offered the audience “Nobody’s Heart Belongs To Me,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Evergreen,” and a version of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” on which her voice sounded as pure as it did on
The Third Album
nearly half a century earlier. She came back for an encore and sang “The Way We Were.”

Reviewing the combination DVD/CD of the show released May 4, 2010, Allison Stewart of the
Washington Post
wrote,
“
Streisand’s legendary range is still remarkable, and intact. Backed by an uncommonly adept four-piece band, she liberated the best tracks on
Love is the Answer
(‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most’ and ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,’ both much sprightlier) from their glossy, too-careful studio versions, and set new benchmarks for standards such as ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.’
One Night Only
is as much about Streisand the storyteller as it is Streisand the singer. The CD version best demonstrates Streisand’s enduring vocal mastery, but the many digressions about, among other things, Marlon Brando, obscure Broadway productions and former president Bill Clinton’s late mother, Virginia, break up the flow. It’s better watched than listened to.’

Stewart marveled that “Streisand does not sweat. Even in a steamy club, sardined on a tiny stage while wearing a sweater. By the end of the night, even Sarah Jessica Parker (in the front row,
verklempt
during ‘The Way We Were’) looked like she needed to be rinsed down with a hose. Streisand, the likely beneficiary of Cybill Shepherd-style camera filters, looked perfect. Even her blowout survived.”

Barbra’s one-night-only concert was primarily arranged to promote the release of her album of jazz standards,
Love Is the Answer
, produced by Barbra, Diana Krall, and Tony LiPuma. For years Streisand fans had hoped to hear Barbra sing with simply a quartet of musicians behind her, and with this album their wish was satisfied.

Johnny Mandel arranged and conducted many of the songs on the album. “Barbra first got together with Diana and went over the songs she wanted to do and the keys in which she wanted to sing them,” Mandel said, “and then Diana and I spoke about the approach.” He arranged five songs in a month. “Once those were completed, Barbra recorded her vocal tracks with just Diana’s quartet. Then those songs came back to me for the orchestral arrangements. After those were added, Barbra listened to the results and in many cases re-recorded her vocal tracks.”

Mandel’s challenge, he said, was how to orchestrally surround the arrangements he wrote for the quartet. “You don’t want to hear the quartet accompanied by the orchestra, or first the quartet and then the orchestra. I hate that sound—hearing one and then the other. Barbra has never released an album like this before, with a jazz quartet plus orchestration. She had mixed feelings about it, mostly over concern that just the sound of a quartet might be too spare for her sound.”

So that her fans could have it both ways,
Love Is the Answer
was released as a two-disc package, one disc featuring Barbra singing with a full orchestra, and one with just Krall’s quartet behind her. Both approaches work wonderfully. “Diana records differently than I usually do,” Barbra said. “I mostly sing live with an orchestra, where she’ll sing with a quartet, then add the orchestra later... I love the inspiration of the orchestra (but) the most fun we had, in a way, was with the quartet. It was a throwback to the way I sang in clubs when I was 18 or 19 or 20.”

Barbra and Diana, a forty-four-year-old British Columbia native and mother of twin boys, got along famously. “We ate a lot,” Barbra told Elysa Gardner of
USA Today
. “There’s something about recording that makes me want to eat. We would bring Italian food, or go out to dinner.” They also played cards, swapped growing-up stories and talked about “girl-girly stuff,” in Krall’s words.

Barbra said she had wanted to sing many of the songs on the album for a long time. She had previously recorded but not released “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” Other songs like “If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas),” “Make Someone Happy,” and the Sinatra classic “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” she would be recording for the first time.

Diana confessed to being a little in awe of Barbra. “I was just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, do I deserve to be here?’” she said. “I’ve always admired (her) as a singer, and a comic actress. The first movie I ever watched was
What’s Up Doc?
” When Barbra sang something that Diana loved, Barbra said, “she would point to the hairs on her arm standing up. It was cute, my audience of one... Diana is a good friend, and it’s lovely to work with talented people.”

Love Is the Answer
debuted at number one on the
Billboard
album chart and went Gold less than two months after its release. Thus Barbra became the first artist to have a number one album in
five
consecutive decades (and just in the nick of time!). The album was nominated for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. This was the fifty-seventh Grammy nomination of her career.

In 1984, Barbra found a house she loved on the cliffs of Malibu, on a cul-de-sac overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She was living at her ranch in Malibu Canyon on weekends and in the Carolwood House during the week. She had first rented on Carolwood while she was making
On A Clear Day
, then purchased the property a few years later. “I never really like the Carolwood house,” Barbra wrote, “even though I lived there for thirty years.”

She wasn’t able to buy the house on the cliff at the time because she’d been unable to sell the Malibu Canyon property, which comprised twenty-four acres and five homes. (She ultimately donated the spread to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.)