Music Overpowers Streisand's Many Missteps
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Barbra Streisand took a carefully plotted step down from the imperial pedestal she has occupied for decades at Madison Square Garden last night and stumbled. The biggest miscalculation was the appearance, late in the show, of a George W. Bush impersonator (Steve Bridges) who Ms. Streisand, an ardent Democrat, interrogated in a tone that tried to be witty, and failed.
How would the president erase the national debt? Sell Canada; they don’t use half of it, he replied. “If I cared about polls,” he remarked, “I would have run for President of Poland.” And so on.
The tepid segment mercifully ended after the two joined voices for an unfunny spoof of the famous Judy Garland-Streisand duet of “Get Happy,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
When Ms. Streisand stopped talking and started singing, she was her old self.
Accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra, she performed more than two dozen songs that encompassed most of her career. Missing were her hits with the Bee Gees, with whom she reunited on her last studio album, “Guilty Pleasures” (Columbia), and songs from her film “Yentl.”
Most heavily represented was “Funny Girl,” (both the show and the movie) in a thrilling end of Act 1 suite that peaked with three ballads: “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” “My Man,” and “People,” all beautifully sung.
One of the pleasures of a Streisand concert is hearing this diva of divas live, her voice unembellished by “improvements” carried out in the recording studio.
In her drive for technical perfection, Ms. Streisand has a longstanding tendency to apply too many coats of aural varnish to her records.
She should realize that sounding like an imperfect human being is more expressive than trying to sound like God, and her singing last night was frequently magnificent. Her voice is fuller than it used to be and still drips with the juice most singers begin to lose at 50. (Ms. Streisand is 64).
Another misstep was the choice of Il Divo, the operatic boy band, as her musical guests. While this multilingual, multinational quartet of singing mannequins, assembled by the diabolically market-savvy impresario Simon Cowell, belts in tune, they have the emotional spontaneity of robots in tuxedos.
An early low point of the show was their arrival on stage to bombard Ms. Streisand with smarmy flattery. Let’s hope she never records with these pretenders to the kitsch pop throne of Andrea Bocelli.
Befitting an event that suggested a one-woman Super Bowl in which the star competed with her legend, the concert was packed with distracting bells and whistles. A useless question-and-answer session in which she responded to randomly selected audience questions wasted precious time. During the Bush impersonation, a solitary heckler so annoyed Ms. Streisand that she lost her temper and hurled an obscenity.
A Barbra Streisand concert should be about singing. That’s what people really want. The rest they tolerate out of respect for her gigantic talent. And when she stuck to music, there were many magnificent moments. “Starting Here, Starting Now,” the “Funny Girl” suite, “When the Sun Comes Out,” “Children Will Listen,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” and “My Shining Hour” were the musical high points of a concert that was further dampened by the lack of a pre-performance sound check because Ms. Streisand was stuck in traffic. As a result, the acoustics of the first half of the concert were muddy.
True to her show business instincts, she saved the best for last. In her final sprint, she might have a scored a winning touchdown had she not interrupted it with the Bush impersonator. And near the end sabotaged her own glorious performance of “Somewhere” by bringing Il Divo as a robotic harmony chorus.
A poignant moment for those who have followed Ms. Streisand’s career from the beginning was her rendition of (“Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair?” a Billy Barnes ballad that she recorded in 1964. Way back then, it was the reflection of an insecure ingénue feeling her first intimations of ennui after too much partying.
Sung four decades later, with just as much passion but an entirely different outlook, Ms. Streisand made it a rhetorical question about her own future. Has she stayed too long at the fair? Despite all the evening’s missteps, the answer is a resounding no.
