DVD - Barbra Streisand – The Concerts

Reviews, By Mark Adnum, 15th April, 2009

This lovingly-packaged (look for the picture of the flowers and card sent by Whoopi Goldberg) 3-DVD box set presents Barbra’s most recent final farewell tour for the first time.

Though she wrapped the tour – which did a circuit of Europe after a sellout season in the States – in 2007, Barbra’s vocal quality and her physical appearance seem suspiciously superior (thinner voice “stronger”, “stronger” body thinner) to online footage of the concert posted a couple of years ago and some rumour mongers have implied that it’s these improvements that have kept this DVD release in post-production for the past eighteen months. Also included is the making of The Broadway Album, which originally screened on TV, and 1995-6’s Barbra: The Concert, already available separately on DVD.

Missing, thankfully, is a copy of Timeless, her 1999-2000 tour, where Barbra dressed in bedazzled pup tents and sang primarily to her husband James Brolin, who was seated in the front row night after night. Fans were disappointed with the endless stream of diabetic teleprompter anecdotes about him, her and their love-infused life together, as well as the short shrift Barbra gave to her early work, especially some of her signature standards from Funny Girl, which she rejected on the grounds that she could no longer sing quirky songs about longing and theatre life in New York now that she was happily married in Malibu.

Both complaints had evidently been passed on to Barbra (no doubt gingerly and by someone who was killed soon after) before she embarked on her most recent tour, the imaginatively-titled Streisand: The Tour, as the set list was comprised entirely of songs from her Early Era – the orchestra even play the complete, original Funny Girl overture at the beginning of the concert. James isn’t mentioned either – at all!

But fear not, Barbra is still a woman very much in love only this time it’s her fluffy white dog, a blackcurrant-eyed Coton du Tulear named Samantha that takes center stage – literally, as an assistant brings her to stage towards the end of Act Two and audiences are treated to/mortified by the sight of Barbra sitting on the floor cradling and baby-talking her stagestruck pooch. Viewers will also delight in Barbra and Samantha’s antics at the end of Act One, where Barbra shuffles off the stage complaining about the heat and wondering if she has any of her chicken dinner left (true) only to come alive in the dressing room where she gets on all fours and points her more-than-ample backside at the camera to greet Sammie and then play catch-ems and some sort of hideaway game much to the dog’s apparent joy.

Fans will have already seen the Barbra: The Concert – her original once-only return to the stage tour from the mid 1990s – many times since it was performed, screened on network TV, and released on DVD itself several years ago. The third disc, Putting It Together: The Making Of The Broadway Album, was originally a television special and much of the footage here, too, which includes the video for Somewhere and various behind-the-scenes takes of Barbra in the recording studio will already be known backwards by any Barbra lover. Clips from the last tour did major YouTube time, especially the one that captured the moment she told a pro-Bush heckler to “shut the fuck up”:

and that is absent from this DVD, which was filmed early in the tour in front of a remarkably suburban crowd deep in Florida. Later in the tour she added a knockout live version of The Woman In The Moon - a fan favourite which she’d never performed live since she recorded it in front of countless screaming hordes at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium in 1976 for A Star Is Born – and this too is a YouTube hit, but an inferior version of this is included as an afterthought here, in the disc’s Bonus Features.

The gap between the personae Streisand has deployed over the years is alarmingly evident in these three discs and it’s probably the most intriguing thing about the otherwise underwhelming set. The Streisand of the mid 1980s was riding high after Yentl and her affair with Don Johnson and speaks with authority and sexiness. As well, her supersonic voice was at its peak and never better matched than with the set of Broadway standards she perfected on the multi-Grammy winning and multi-platinum selling The Broadway Album.

By the mid 1990s, a touch of reclusiveness had crept in despite her continued megastardom and rumoured affair with then President Bill Clinton. When she returned to the public stage for the first time in well over twenty years, her voice a gear lower but her preachy lefty politics, insistence on conscientious child-raising, love of mysticism and related friendships with Deepak Chopra et al, resentment of her mother etc. ratcheted up to infinity, many cried tears of joy. Despite her nerves she was grandly imperious, and no amount of self-depricating Brooklyn humour dented her diva veneer. The hair! The diamonds! The gowns! Barbra hasn’t changed her look since, but ten years on, she’s mellowed so much that she’s all but unrecognisable.

Here’s a new Barbra, a very wealthy and very hungry dog-loving woman in her sixties who puts on her reading glasses to pull audience questions out of a vase during an “Ask Barbra” segment and who changes from a comfy pair of slippers into diamond-studded Jimmy Choos only the second before she goes on (an assistant puts them on for her).

Fans will no doubt snap this up – and the latest concert isn’t available on any format in the US – while others may take it as a really interesting accidental documentary about the magnificent one and some of her eccentric incarnations.

Barbra Streisand – The Concerts (3 DVD set) is in stores now through Universal Music.