The timeless Barbra Streisand

A Barbra Streisand concert is never just a rundown of greatest hits. It is musical theater. Songs, sets, dialogue, and machinery revolve around themes, story lines, issues, but above all, Barbra Streisand.

And why not? After all, Streisand has sold more albums (over 62 million in the US alone) than any other female singer. Out of the 55 albums to her name, 42 are certified gold, 24 are platinum, and 13 are multi-platinum. She is the only singer to have number-one albums in every decade since the 1960s. Thirty-three years separate her first number-one album (People) from her last (Higher Ground), an incredible and unparalleled feat of longevity in an industry as invariable as the exchange rate. She is also the only artist to receive awards from all the major institutions in the performing arts: the Oscar (film), the Grammy (music), the Emmy (television), and the Tony (stage). To quote from one of her songs, she is simply "the greatest star."

It is fitting, then, that her latest – and last – series of concerts is called Timeless and equally fitting that it is preserved, in pretty, petal-pink CDs characteristically Barbra, for posterity. The audio recording of her New Year’s Eve concert at the MGM Grand Garden Arena captures the energy and excitement of the 13,000-strong crown and the elegance, elan, and yes, ego of Streisand herself.

This historic performance – the highest-earning single concert ever ($14,694,750 in one evening) – brings to mind Streisand’s equally historic The Concert six years ago. Streisand reprises some of the numbers from that other show, including On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Way We Were and A Piece of Sky, which, as in The Concert is presented as a self-duet. Repeating his role as conductor, Marvin Hamlisch arranges the music in generally the same style as he did in 1994. However, for this show, Streisand adds a choir and a supporting cast, including a tap-dancing Brother Time. She also includes songs that nobody, fans included, though she would ever sing again (e.g., the discohit The Main Event/Fight).

Although staged to welcome the new millennium, Timeless for the most part is a trip back to simpler times. Streisand returns to the songs from first album (e.g., As Time Goes By, Cry Me a River) and to early, less familiar arrangements (e.g., for Happy Days Are Here Again). Listeners unacquainted with the nearly Barbra may find certain segments of the concert a little slow or talky, or chafe at the omission of such Streisand standards as He Touched Me and My Man. However, those with the "Just for the Records" box set will recognize – and relish – the show’s many nostalgic allusions.

For as always, Streisand is unapologetically self-referential. She not only sings with herself, as she did in 1994, but also sings with a junior Barbra, played by Lauren Frost. At one point there are three Barbras singing together. The spiels are variations of "I remember when I...," which inevitably end in a truism by Streisand about Streisand. The memories and the milieu (New York in the early 60s) are lovingly evoked, but the autobiographical reminiscences sometimes border on the precious.

For instance, Streisand recounts how she received a 60-year-old letter written by her father, a man she never has really known, from a woman whom he had courted before he met Streisand’s mother. "It was as if my father was trying to communicate something. It was a profound experience for me. Mystical," she says sotto voce before segueing, in perfect, scripted tempo, to Papa, Can You Hear Me?

It would be hard to find an artist more full of herself than Barbra Streisand, but in her egotism lies precisely her mystique. As one writer-friend noted, Streisand embodies the myth of an American Individualism: if you believe in yourself, you’ll make it, even (and the more dramatic) if you are poor, homely, female, Jewish, or all of the above – in America anyway. That is the recurrent theme of Timeless, and that is what the fascinating, campy, colorful text we call "Barbra Streisand" signifies.

The show’s opening is a good illustration. We hear a recalcitrant young Barbra improvising the ending of You’ll Never Know, much to the exasperation of the piano player. He tells her, "Just do what I tell you" and "Don’t change a note." Amid his remarks that "she’ll never make it," the young Barbra sings the opening verse of Something Coming. When mature Barbra steps in – dramatically, and self-consciously, at the line it may come canonballing down from the sky/glean in its eye /bright as a rose – she tells her alter ego to keep listening to that voice inside.

The myth of the self-made Self is always attractive, specially among people who are at odds with authority or the mob. When Streisand sings and talks about herself, she is actually singing and speaking in behalf of the ugly ducklings, the wallflowers, the runners-up, the Quasimodos, the mavericks, the renegades, the "bagel on a plateful of onion rolls" – anyone who insist on his or her difference in a homogenizing environment. Instead of dismissing difference as aberration, Streisand affirms it as uniqueness, individuality, independence.

The irony, of course, is that while representing the value of individuality, Streisand is notoriously domineering and controlling – even in this concert, which she co-wrote, produced, and directed. (Fans prefer to think of her as a "perfectionist.") Every pattern is scripted, timed (there’s the countdown to the new century, after all), and, like dialogue in a movie, dramatically underscored by the orchestra. Save for the applause everything in this concert, including the jokes, seems teleprompted. The show is as much theatrical as musical.

But in the end, what matters in the singing. And Streisand’s still untarnished, inspired, and inspiring. Admittedly, the songs are shorter, slower and more low-key; the spiels between numbers are longer and more frequent. But the voice is also mellower, suppler, warmer, with just the right hint of huskiness. Streisand glides effortlessly from note to note, and characteristically phrases lines with an ear for drama. Here and there she adds new touches of old favorites, inserting a lilting grace note in People, for example, or embellishing the coda of Evergreen. The results is music stirring, soothing, singular.

At 58, Streisand has threatened to retire from the stage (again). If she makes true her threat this time, then Timeless makes a proper conclusion to an extraordinary 40-year career, a career that demands and deserves the longest and loudest of ovations.