“I remember saying to my mum when I was young, ‘Mum, am I pretty?’ and she said, ‘You’re unusual. There’s no one like you.’ At the time I was really hurt. But as I got older I thought, ‘It’s good to be different. It’s good to be a one-off.’”
“Different” was always the vibe. As a kid growing up in Brookyln, Streisand often recalled, the two things that set her apart were that she didn’t have a father – he died when she was a baby – and that she could sing. That’s evident on her first, astoundingly accomplished recording, You’ll Never Know, made on holiday with her mum in the Catskills at the age of 13.
But staggering as her instrument was, Streisand’s personality was bigger. At 18 she was opening for Phyllis Diller at New York’s Bon Soir nightclub. By the time Lucille Ball was fawning over her on her CBS radio show in 1964, she was a 22-year-old talk show staple with a Broadway hit and three albums behind her. Johnny Carson was a big fan. So was Groucho Marx.
Her collaborations with Barry Gibb marked the peak of Streisand’s pop years.Credit:Robin Platzer/Getty
The MSO’s creative director, Cameron Menzies, wouldn’t be born for another 10 years, but he was destined to be smitten too. His earliest Babs memory is being woken on Sunday mornings by his mum playing the Guilty album. The Barry Gibb collaboration marked the peak of her pop years, but as the young Australian stage performer pursued his own dreams, Menzies came to see the sheer breadth of her work as her most inspiring asset.
“I guess with anybody who has that God-given gift in any field, when it comes easy, you do want to explore other avenues. If you’re that sort of person … you thrive on challenge. When she talks about her singing, she says she just wanted to be the greatest actress that ever lived. Singing was an extension of her acting.”
What Streisand chose to sing, often against the advice of the suits attempting to guide her career, was just as inspiring. When she signed her first contract with Columbia Records, she fought for a degree of creative control unheard of for a 21-year-old. Twenty-odd years later, having conquered the ’80s pop charts, her bold return to show tunes was another fight. For young performers like Cameron Menzies, it was a landmark event.
Memories
1960: Her first professional gig at New York’s Bon Soir night club pays $125 a week.
1962: Office secretary Tessie Marmelstein, a secondary role in Broadway musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale, puts her on the map.
1969: Wins Best Actress Oscar for her film debut in Funny Girl.
1970: As Star of the Decade at the annual Tony Awards, she joins the exclusive EGOT club: to date just 21 artists who have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards.
1976: Becomes the first woman to win an Academy Award as a composer (with co-writer Paul Williams) for Evergreen.
1980: Guilty, written and produced by Barry Gibb, becomes her most successful album.
1983: With Yentl, becomes the first woman to write, produce, direct and star in a major studio movie.
1991: Just For The Record box set reveals more than 70 previously unheard tracks from her archives: a pioneering concept embraced by Bob Dylan and others.
1992: Campaigns for presidential hopeful Bill Clinton, part of ongoing public support for US Democrat party.
1994: Comeback tour after 27 years off stage reportedly makes her the highest-paid concert performer to date.
2003: Her lawsuit objecting to topographical photos of her Malibu home coins the term “Streisand Effect”: when an attempt to censor information draws unprecedented attention to it.
2006: Streisand: The Tour breaks box office records again.
2014: With Partners, an album of duets with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Andrea Bocelli and Elvis Presley, becomes the only artist to have number one albums in six consecutive decades.
2015: Awarded the USA’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, alongside Stephen Sondheim, Steven Spielberg, Gloria Estefan.
2016: Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway is her 11th number one album: a standing record for a female artist.
“On that opening track of The Broadway Album, she uses people like David Geffen and Sydney Pollack saying things like, ‘I thought she was original’, and ‘Well, no one’s gonna buy it …’
“It was always, ‘No, you can’t’, and she was always like, ‘Well, how do you know? I’m not gonna do it that way, I’m gonna do it this way.’ Even the Sondheim stuff on her Broadway album, she got him to change lyrics; to do different orchestrations.”
Caroline O’Connor, too, fell for Babs all over again as Gibb and Summer gave way to Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Oh, my God, this was just the most wonderful thing I’d ever heard,” she says. “She was doing all these numbers from some of the most amazing and magical and extraordinary musicals on one album. The orchestra, the magnificence of it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Some people think musical theatre is a bit corny,” she confides. “Sometimes we get a bit of a bad rap.” With that album, “Barbra brought it back and put it in a class of its own.”
Despite the grim warnings of industry experts, The Broadway Album hit number one in America, sold millions across a dozen countries, put Sondheim and Bernstein back up the singles charts and won Streisand her ninth Grammy – ironically, in the same category she’d owned every few years since 1964: Best Pop Vocal.
The voice. It all comes back to that. It’s still all there, she assured me last year, even if she hasn’t toured in six years; hasn’t sung in the studio since her politically motivated and coolly received Walls album of 2018.
“Her sense of pitch, her sense of time, the nuances in her instrument; she really is freakishly good,” says Katie Noonan. The Brisbane singer came late to Babs, she acknowledges, being steeped in classical and jazz training and more skewed to singer-songwriter fare as she came of age in the ’90s.
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“But about 15 years ago, I was asked to sing one of her songs and … I was just overcome by her artistry as a singer. What I love about that generation is that they all existed before [ubiquitous pitch correction software] Auto-Tune … So you can tell she’s a legitimately wonderful singer.
“She’s able to embody the song in a way that actors can. She is generally always singing someone else’s story, but she manages to do it in a way that makes it feel like it’s her own story, which I think is an incredible thing.”
At 80, her own story eclipses any song in her epic repertoire. The cult of Barbra is immense and incredibly detailed. “You need to speak with your fingers,” says famous impersonator Steven Brinberg. Watch how she moves her lips when she sings the word “so”, British singer Claire Williams advises in her frame-by-frame video tutorials. You’ll need the NARS Orgasm blush range to get that Funny Girl look, says one YouTube beauty consultant. “It’s peachier.”
Her social and political clout, meanwhile, adds a whole other dimension to Streisand’s relentlessly progressive and persuasive agenda. Her daily tweets are far more likely to focus on political corruption, women’s health, climate inaction, LGBTQI+ rights, gun control and global affairs (her paternal grandparents emigrated from Ukraine) than to spruik her incredible legacy as an entertainer who has thrived long enough to duet with Judy Garland and Celine Dion.
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“When you look at that body of work, surely no one can reach that,” says Caroline O’Connor, who has portrayed both Garland and Edith Piaf (both gone at 47) on stage. “She still does perform and record. I don’t know how long that will go on. But in that respect, I don’t think there’ll be anybody that will surpass that legacy.”
The MSO presents To Barbra, With Love at Hamer Hall April 21-23. mso.com.au
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