The diva has landed: Barbra Streisand's current tour includes stops in Montreal and Toronto. (Tom Mihalek/Associated Press)
Barbra Streisand has long complained of being misrepresented in the media. She has repeatedly moaned that in deriding her progressive political stances, the vindictive press gets everything wrong. But forget the tabloids; the hardest thing to reconcile in the Streisand mythology is something she has repeatedly stated in interviews. According to Babs, she hates getting in front of a crowd. In fact, she suffers from severe bouts of stage fright.
This is difficult to believe, given that the woman looks so comfortable in front of a crowd. In her first Canadian appearance in decades (she performed in Winnipeg in the early ’60s), Streisand checked into the Bell Centre in Montreal on Sunday night and proceeded to knock over a full house. At 64, her expressive voice seems to have lost none of its range.
Audience members had shelled out anywhere from $80 for nosebleed seats in the arena’s upper strata to $850 for front-row seats. For devout Barbraphiles, that hefty price was still a bargain.
The current tour has allowed her to revisit standout numbers from her career, including People, Funny Girl, The Way We Were and Don’t Rain on My Parade. Also intact is the infamous Bush sketch, in which an impersonator of the current American president takes to the stage to confess that he has always admired her talent. Streisand shows her gratitude by ridiculing him. During their back-and-forth, the faux Bush explains that he’ll pay off the American national debt by selling Canada. American critics have already noted the obviousness of the shtick, but that didn’t stop the Montreal crowd from lapping it up, roaring their approval when Babs suggested that Send in the Clowns should be the Republican theme song.
While making the obligatory local references, Streisand said she was thrilled that Justin Trudeau was in the audience. She then went on to say that she remembered spending time with his father, calling an outing with Pierre Trudeau “a very exciting night in my life.” Streisand also made a nod to Canada’s bilingualism, singing one tune, Ma Premiere Chanson, en français.
For all of her singing prowess, the show was touched by two other familiar elements in the Babs persona: kitsch and schmaltz. Kitsch came in European form, with the Il Divo singing troupe belting out a bunch of numbers (including My Way) at various points in the evening. Their appearance generally detracted from the singular impact of Streisand’s performance. In the schmaltz department, Streisand had a photo of her son, Jason Gould, projected onto a giant screen. Declaring her love for him, she went on to liken children to sponges, urging parents in the audience to teach their offspring about love and not hate.
Streisand has had her missteps, some of them borderline epic — witness films like The Mirror Has Two Faces and duets like the one she recorded with Don Johnson. But her sheer talent as a live performer trumps it all. At one point, Streisand sang her distinctive rendition of Happy Days Are Here Again. That song, she noted, became the anthem of the Democratic Party in the U.S. in 1932. By incorporating it into her setlist, she seemed to be creating an ode to what she sees as better times.
In one of many moments when Streisand paused between songs to crack a joke or reminisce with the audience, she explained the mystique around her stage fright. In 1967, she ascended a stage in Central Park in Manhattan for a concert. She recalled freezing up, fumbling over the lyrics to three songs. She now credits the teleprompter for being able to get back on stage, knowing she always had a backup system in case of a mental block. By night’s end, after what seemed like a perfectly rendered performance, many people here were probably thanking the inventors of that magical device.
Matthew Hays is a writer based in Montreal.
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