Loading home…
o promote her new album, Love is the Answer, Barbra Streisand sang a one-night-only gig at New York's famed jazz club, The Village Vanguard. Richard Jay-Alexander, who directed this how explained that “the reason Marty [Erlichman, Barbra's manager] had his eye on this particular club was because it is the only venue of its kind still standing and in business from the era during which Barbra began singing in clubs like The Lion and the Bon Soir, which no longer exist.” Fans were given a chance to get free tickets to the Vanguard show by either pre-ordering her new CD or registering for a lottery online. The Village Vanguard only seats about one hundred twenty people! Streisand, her band, and Richard Jay-Alexander rehearsed at the club on Friday, September 25th. “The band shows up for the first time,” Jay-Alexander wrote, “having rehearsed the ‘set’ of songs the prior day at a rehearsal studio and prepping more songs than we need, awaiting Barbra’s final choices, after a rehearsal.” Pianist Tamir Hendelman was happy that the band got enough rehearsal time. “We spent 20 minutes to half an hour for each song,” he said. “We played them through, talked about what kind of flavor we wanted to give it. So by the time Barbra joined us, we didn't really need to talk about the music, since it was already there, and other things needed to be talked about at that point—you know, the lighting, this and that. But the music really flowed. That's the best way I can describe it.” The buses which carried the lucky fans who won the Village Vanguard lottery tickets arrived around 7:00 p.m. Celebrities and friends of Miss Streisand entered the club closer to show time: Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; daughter Chelsea Clinton and her fiancee; Barbra's husband James Brolin; Sarah Jessica Parker; Nicole Kidman; Donna Karan; actress Phyllis Newman; Alan and Marilyn Bergman; mogul Barry Diller; Frank Rich of the New York Times; Deborah Lee Furness [wife of Hugh Jackman]; Columbia Records chief Rob Stringer; Hollywood manager Sandy Gallin; and Tommy LiPuma, who produced Love is the Answer with Streisand and Diana Krall. Streisand entered the Village Vanguard through the audience and joined her four musicians on the stage, greeted by a standing ovation. On stage with her: a chair, a small round table with a single pink rose in a vase, Barbra's eye glasses, a notecard, two lozenges, and tea in paper cups—which Barbra toasted the audience with during her first song. A large TelePrompTer was set up in the back right of the room near the entrance door. “This is hysterical,” Barbra joked as she stepped on the small stage. “Are we a box of sardines here or what?” Before singing her first song (“Here's To Life”) Barbra addressed the small audience: “I haven't sung in the Village since 1962. And after everything I've done and everywhere I've been, I'm back to where I started. Life is a circle, right? So, this is where I was. And this is where I am now.” Then, a little later, Streisand said, “It’s hard to have stage fright when there’s hardly any stage!” The show began at about 8:10 p.m. Richard Jay-Alexander explained that video director Scott Lochmus “and his team were totally up to it and he assigned five cameras inside (which you had no idea were there) and one outside to capture arrivals, the fans, etc.” Inside the club on the stage there were introductions by director Richard Jay-Alexander. Several people who were there during Barbra’s early Greenwich Village days spoke to the audience: Lorraine Gordon, widow of the Village Vanguard’s owner, Max Gordon; Rick Edelstein, a waiter at the Village Vanguard who arranged for Barbra's first audition at the venue, and finally, Marty Erlichman, Barbra Streisand’s longtime manager. Uptown, at the Waldorf-Astoria Louis XVI room, a live video feed was shown to a small audience including some of Streisand's family, Columbia Records employees, and former New York Mayor David Dinkins.