Streisand is the type of performer who, over a year on her show Bon Soir, jokes to the audience, “People complain that I don’t live up to standards. Well, here’s a standard,” then started “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with an unfathomable world of featherweights. Her singing range is not just a matter of octaves. It’s the variety of characters that voices can find for a song. In “The Big Bad Wolf”, it’s story time and the operetta, Big Mama Thornton and Ethel Merman. As for “Lover, Come Back to Me,” it was something to confront Ella Fitzgerald in the way she was able to keep up, especially in concert, from the botanical garden to the boxing match. That performance definitely ranks there with supreme Streisand explanations of anything. By the age of 20, she had almost mastered all that was, in 1962, her standard, her music.
That, of course, is what worries the ensemble: a repertoire that includes Tin Pan Alley and the show’s tunes, those creepy ballads and jazz; Oscar Hammerstein, Harold Arlen and Fats Waller. Where are the big pop songs? Contemporary things. The “”Surfin ‘America’“The”Walk like a man. “The”Be my Baby. “The”In handle. “The”It’s my party. “
When Erlichman took her to auditions — live — for Capitol, RCA, and Columbia, “Everybody said the same thing,” he recalls. “” She has a beautiful voice. (If he ever wrote a book, he said, he would call it “Wednesday Good Book.”) Obviously, she has great artistic ability. “She doesn’t sing commercial songs,” Erlichman said. And “executives, they’re scared to break a new ground.”
But Streisand can appreciate the splendor of an old object. That’s all she wears vintage outfits on stage. “I always buy vintage clothes,” she says, “because I think they are so pretty. I admire the ingenuity of the defense.” Craftsmanship of the 1890s.
She said: “On opening night, I wore a black velvet beaded turtleneck. “I asked my tailor to make me a little black velvet dress to go with it. But I don’t know you shouldn’t dress like that. I didn’t know that when you sing in a nightclub, you have to wear a gown or something elegant, made of wonderful silks or satins.” At some point on “The Bon Soir,” you can hear her telling the audience that she’s wearing her boyfriend’s suit. She told me that “masculine and feminine are what I’m comfortable with.”
Her admiration for well-crafted things clearly extends to the Great American Songbook: sublime craftsmanship. Hundreds of dynamic, adjustable songs based on characters, stories, puns, and variations of a theme. For a singer, learning them is like doing math or solving crosswords or architecture. They are also an opportunity to act, which is what Streisand says she wanted to do in the first place. During her Bon Soir run, she split her day between nightclubs and Broadway, where she was loudly making a name for herself as Miss Marmelstein’s secretary in “I can get it for you wholesale.”
