Control freak Barbra Streisand forgot the lyric to a song during her 1967 Central Park concert and it freaked her our. She didn’t perform on stage again till 1994, and she has toured three times and I saw her twice. Once, the turn of the millennium masterpiece “Timeless”m then I skipped the 2006 performance at MSG mostly due to the extortionate price, but went again, despite the $400 ticket shock at Barclay Center, October 12th, 2012.
That was first direct from Ticketmaster and that was for an OK nothing special seat and that was OK for a nothing special set I reviewed here. As much as you can blame anything for our second greatest living singer’s irritating set, it is that it was a conceptual mish mosh. One part return to Brooklyn, one part tribute to her favorite songwriters, and, if you were there, one part chatty patty.
I was disappointed in the set though not her voice, and listening to the recorded artifact Back To Brooklyn, with much of the spiel, complete nonsense from this titanic ego pretending to be an everywoman, not surviving, the album recovered from the slack pacing of the live show, though not often enough to save it.
Streisand can sing, her timing is great but her phrasing has the beauty of speaking in sound, of giving over to a song and making it whole. She makes everything completely, otherworldly, human, her breathing almost operatic, and her tone so gorgeous and smooth, on a great ballad like “The Way We Were” or “People” , it is like a transformed humanity. I’ve always preferred Streisand as a balladeer than as a belter, but she can do anything, she can sing anything. With the exception of rock and roll, she is comfortable in any genre (remember “Stoney End” is a Laura Nyro cover), even disco.
But she can’t make a bad song great, she needs the material, and she needs to concentrate her powers or she meanders into a sort of Borscht Belt bullshit that strains credibility well past the breaking point. The versions of Streisand faves and a handful of obscurities only transcend their live memento limitations twice. Marvin Hamlisch had died just a few months prior to Streisand’s performance and she performs a powerful “The Way We Were” in his memory and the album ends with the gorgeous and apt “Some Other Time”. The rest of the time you get stuff like “Rosie’s Turn” which doesn’t do what she could make it do in a difference circumstance, if she maintained her energy and thought through the entire set.
She has other things in her mind, hailing her roots for what it’s worth, and lecturing us: Barbra might want to tells us about being mother natures guardian or treasuring every minute, it doesn’t mean much, and we are not there for platitudes, but but to hear her sing “Some Other Time”, we understand instinctively what it means to pass through the world on borrowed time.
Grade: C