Film on Barbra Streisand’s 2016 tour shows more star than person
NEW YORK — The point of paying for a babysitter, fighting traffic and paying huge ticket prices to go see your favorite music act in the flesh is to see them working hard — to see them sweat.
But you’ll never catch even a bead of perspiration in the new Barbra Streisand concert film.
An icy Babs efficiently runs through various hits in her vast catalog without a hint of strain or unscripted patter in the tedious Barbra: The Music ... The Mem’ries ... The Magic! on Netflix.
Filmed in Miami, the last stop in her 2016 tour, we see Streisand often sitting on a chair and delivering her songs while staring in the middle distance or simply with her eyes closed.
The audience mostly reverentially.
She kicks it off with Memories and then goes down memory lane with such classics as Everything and Evergreen from A Star Is Born, No More Tears (Enough Is Enough), an overwrought Being at War With Each Other, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Being Alive from Company and an alarmingly over-the-top Papa, Can You Hear Me? from Yentl.
After an intermission and a costume change it’s on to Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and a video about how so many Hollywood stars were freaked out to be able to perform on her latest duets album.
There’s also Losing sits My Mind from Follies, Isn’t This Better from Funny Lady, then Don’t Rain on My Parade and People. The concert gets progressively more drowsy until Jamie Foxx adds a jolt of pure electricity as its only special guest. He revs up the crowd and sings an awesome Climb Ev’ry Mountain with Streisand, delivering a seven-minute tour de force.
He’s badly missed as soon as we’re back to just Babs. She sings Jingle Bells and With One More Look at You. Her encore, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, comes after awkward patter.
Then we see her eat a postconcert dinner of crabs. Seriously.
It’s all so very slick and calculated, right down to the digital petals that fall on a projection screen behind Streisand, the film montages or the elegant tea set on a side table with perfect flowers in a vase. Yes, her voice is superb, a perfectly calibrated sports car. But there’s no soul. Her small fluffy dog has more charisma.
A self-serving Streisand likes to remind the crowd about her vast success, including a CD of Broadway tunes she insisted on recording despite contrary advice and a history of her No 1 albums over six decades. The audience roars at that, but Babs coolly responds: “It’s OK. Didn’t mean to have applause there. It’s just a fact.”
Over 100 minutes, Streisand manages to say nothing provocative, insightful or even very interesting. She insists old Broadway show tunes will never be out of date, and laments that climate change is real but her prescription is to make a wish and go into her mind to create the world the way she wants it to be.
“I’ve been blessed that so many of my dreams have come true,” she says at one point. “So all you little girls out there, even if you want to be president of the United States, don’t stop dreaming. Nothing’s impossible.”
At no point does Streisand really interact with the crowd. In fact, she barely listens to their shouted requests or adorations.
“I’m feeling the love,” she tells them, but it feels like a lie. One suspects she’d perform exactly like this in a completely empty arena, a ballgowned, straight-haired superstar on pure autopilot. Give it to Barbra: She never lets you see her sweat.