Happy 70th Barbra Streisand Birthday to you and yours.
With more than 50 years since her Broadway debut, It’s amazing to think Barbra’s been mega-famous longer than I’ve been alive.
In between prepping the call with Andrea as she drove to Sedona, I snuck in some Barbra memories.
This is perhaps my very favorite. I am, in fact, totally obsessed with how it starts out completely demure, even little girl lost, and ends with almost a kind of no-holds barred roughness, an out-on-the-edge quality she completely abandoned in her latter decades of diva perfection.
Seriously, starting at around 2:07 with the key change, there’s just no stopping her.
And like Tyra Banks (decades later) at 2:42 she’s totally mastered “ugly pretty” with the last repetition of the song’s title “When the Sun Comes Out.” The way she sings that line, with her jerky head and the snarl in her voice … well, It’s no-holds-barred genius (as is the body turn and look away when she’s done.)
When I used to teach Terrence yoga three times a week, I’d love stories about how he’d seen a 20 year-old Barbra singing at a Village nightclub that seated 40 people in the early 60s, just a block or two away from his current luxe pad.
That was nearly 50 years ago –– and he must have only been just a little older than 20 himself –– and it all seems so incredibly glamorous to have lived in that black and white, Mad Men era of the West Village in the 60s where Barbra was not a legend, but an emerging titan, brilliant but still totally quirky and defining the leading edge with her enormous talent.
And if you doubt it, just see how in under 3 minutes she completes a gigantic emotional arc, utterly devouring this song, and providing that she is really The Greatest Star.
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