She says she’ll never perform a live concert again, but Barbra Streisand is letting viewers sample how one would be. The music and movie superstar did only a few more engagements after her two shows that welcomed the year 2000 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Those two — which yielded a top-selling album — were taped and merged into a special airing Wednesday on Fox as “Barbra Streisand: Timeless” (7 p.m). The two-hour offering charts the entire arc of the artist’s career as she’s backed by a full orchestra, a choir of 105 voices, and clips from some of her best-known films.
Among the songs known at press time to be included are the Streisand staple “People” (from the stage hit “Funny Girl,” which earned Streisand an Oscar in its 1968 screen incarnation), “Something Wonderful,” “Lover Come Back,” “Send in the Clowns,” “Cry Me a River,” “Don’t Like Goodbyes” and the title tune from Streisand’s 1979 movie “The Main Event.”
Sharing the executive-producer credit with Streisand on the “Timeless” special are TV-variety veteran Don Mischer and Martin Erlichman, who has been Streisand’s manager since he first saw her perform in a New York City club in 1961. Erlichman says she wanted the Las Vegas shows taped because “Barbra wasn’t sure at that time if she was ever going to do any more concerts beyond those, so we just wanted something in the memory bank.”
Television also wanted it, since offers to broadcast the show came in immediately. Erlichman turned those down then, explaining that he “couldn’t give anybody a release date for it. Barbra didn’t make up her mind to do additional concerts until (last) February, then she was going to give her final shows in Australia. She then changed her mind and decided to do a couple more for her fans in the United States.” All of those later concerts, which were not taped, had the same structure as the two Las Vegas shows.
“The (performance) is truly a biography of Barbra’s life,” explains Erlichman. “It follows her career musically, with dialogue, from the very beginning all the way up to the present. The beautiful part of my life with Barbra is that I truly am a fan of hers, so it is just not a job for me. I genuinely enjoy watching her and listening to her, and I still get goosebumps in the same places everyone else does. That made her last Las Vegas show very sentimental for me, because I was there from the start.”
Indeed, Streisand was the opening act for another performer Erlichman had gone to see. “She sang five songs, and I got chills from all five,” he recalls. “I went backstage and introduced myself, and three months later, she called me (to represent her). In this industry, artists historically shift (professional) relationships every few years, but over four decades, Barbra and I have never had a contract. We had a handshake, and that was it. She is loyal.”
After the Las Vegas dates captured in “Timeless,” Streisand (now the wife of actor James Brolin) gave several concerts in Australia, then decided to cap her live-performance career with two shows at Los Angeles’ Staples Center and two at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. “She never has really sparked to doing live shows,” Erlichman confirms. “She gets frightened, and I was always aware of that. It made sense for her final concert to be designed as a biography.”
Streisand will be on Fox again before the television season ends, since the network will air her upcoming receipt of the American Film Institute’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award. That may be her last public appearance for a while, since Erlichman doesn’t expect her to reconsider and do more concerts after all. “I’m not thinking beyond what she’s told me,” he says. “She’s thinking about going back into the recording studio, and she’s reading scripts to both act in and direct. We’re addressing all those other things.”
