This article appears in the January/February 2024 print issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.
By now, Barbra Streisand’s devotees know that her long-awaited memoir, “My Name is Barbra,” is 970 pages and the audio version, read by Streisand herself (who else?), runs 48 hours and 14 minutes.
That seems about right for a once-in-an-eon talent whose career spans more than half a century and includes movies, television, Broadway, concerts and recordings, as well as shattering a couple of glass ceilings and winning every industry award along the way. For Streisand’s dedicated followers, including legions of LGBTQ admirers, her memoir could be twice as long and still not enough.
The Brooklyn-born Streisand earned a gay following right from the start. Her first nightclub gig in the summer of 1960 was at the West Village gay bar The Lion. When she moved to the Bon Soir, she became the darling of Greenwich Village for her incandescent voice and quirky, singular style. Gay men and lesbians gravitated to Streisand’s originality and outsiderness; she was “the bagel on a plate of onion rolls.” Like Judy Garland, vulnerability and honesty shimmered beneath raw talent and theatrical verve.
Although Streisand is still very much a New Yorker, Boston holds a significant spot in her storied career. After her first Broadway show, “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” closed in October 1962, her first record, “The Barbra Streisand Album,” was released in February 1963. To promote it, her longtime manager Marty Erlichman booked Streisand on a tour.
“It started out in February at a nightclub called the Frolic in Revere Beach outside Boston,” writes Streisand. “(Marty told me it was run by gangsters, and I remember thinking, That’s good. If there’s any problem, they can protect me!)” The engagement ran February 3–9, 1963. She was such an unknown that the ad in the Boston Globe not only misspelled “Barbra” but conflated her with her character Miss Marmelstein in “Wholesale” to “Miss Marmel Streisand.”
One wishes for more anecdotes in the memoir about that engagement at the Frolic. But it was just a blip in a year that included the tour followed by rigorous rehearsals for her Broadway role as Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl” which would launch Streisand’s star into the stratosphere. From January 13 to February 1, 1964, when Boston was a tryout town for Broadway, “Funny Girl” ran at the Shubert Theater on Tremont Street.
As Streisand documents, the show was a mess. Opening night “went on and on and on for four hours.” The second act was disastrous; the show had already changed directors from gay legend Jerry Robbins, whom Streisand adored, to staid Garson Kanin. The script was being revised constantly, composer Jule Styne added and scrapped songs and Streisand reveals in her memoir that she was subjected to what amounts to flagrant sexual harassment by her costar Sydney Chaplin after Streisand broke off their brief affair. Once on Broadway, his abusive behavior onstage so rattled Streisand that, she says, it was one of the reasons she stopped performing live for so many years.
“I’ll never forget opening night in Boston,” she writes in her chapter on the “Funny Girl” tryout. “There was a huge snowstorm. Roads were blocked. Flights were canceled. Elliot [Gould] managed to make the trip, but my new manager, David Begelman, was stranded and missed the show.”
Boston’s opening night drew, at best, mixed reviews. But not for its star.
In his review published January 19, 1964, Boston Globe critic Kevin Kelly (who was gay) called “Funny Girl” a “sad show” and took to task Isobel Lennart’s book and the character of Nick Arnstein “incompetently played by Sydney Chaplin.”
But, he wrote, “Miss Streisand covers the evening with glory. The artistry of her singing is superb…. Whatever the future of ‘Funny Girl,’ Miss Streisand emerges from it as an incomparable performer.”
According to the comprehensive fan website Barbra Archives, William E. Sarmento of The Lowell Sun newspaper on January 14, 1964 wrote:
“I can only guess, but I’d swear that every Barbra Streisand fan in existence showed up via dog-sled, skis and snowshoes for the opening night of the new musical, ‘Funny Girl,’ last night at the Shubert [in Boston]. And I hope that when they hand out medals for valor that someone will recall that I, too, braved the blizzard to attend this Broadway bound vehicle. In case you are wondering, every seat in the theater was taken last night.”
Besides her links to Boston, Streisand made a one-night-only appearance on July 30, 1966, in Newport, the first stop on a four-city concert tour. The sold-out event, “An Evening with Barbra Streisand” at Festival Field, home of the Newport Jazz Festival, featured longtime collaborator Peter Matz conducting a 35-piece orchestra.
Throughout the memoir, Streisand discusses her natural curiosity about the creative process. Even as a novice performer, she wanted to learn from the best, such as Willy Wyler and Vincente Minnelli, and insisted on creative control of her projects (it’s amazing how many of her instincts turned out to be spot on). Clearly, she was meant to direct. But women, even superstars, rarely got the chance to helm a big studio movie in the ’70s and ’80s. Streisand persisted for 15 years to bring her passion project, “Yentl,” now an LGBTQ classic, to the screen.
I remember the electricity inside the plush Charles Cinema in Boston for a packed screening of “Yentl” in 1983 the night before its official opening at the theater. There is no way to describe the moment when, as the camera swept upward to the soaring finale of “Just a Piece of Sky” and the words “Directed by Barbra Streisand” hit the screen, the capacity crowd in the 900-seat cinema erupted into thunderous cheers and applause. It was a spontaneous show of appreciation and validation; a collective “You go, girl!” for a consummate artist who was, and is, the greatest star.
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