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It feels inappropriate to call the new Barbra Streisand concert documentary a documentary at all, since all the backstage material is crammed into the introduction and then the closing credits, with a short bit at intermission about stone crabs (seriously) and a pre-taped interlude promoting Streisand’s duets album. This is 90% a concert movie, depicting the final show on Streisand’s 13-city tour, with 10% bare-minimum backstage material. Yes, part of that material involves Barbra applying spray-can whipped cream to a key lime pie, but it’s hardly a peek behind the curtain.
This isn’t Gaga: Five Foot Two, a concert/doc hybrid that takes you into the private (albeit heavily performative) world of an artist who exercises an extreme degree of control over her public self — though it obviously could have been given its subject matter. This film is not that. But if you are the type of person who finds camp value in the Streisand persona — that even while you love and appreciate her and her gorgeous voice, you also appreciate that she can be more than a little ridiculous — there is so much to have fun with in Barbra: The Music… The Mem’ries… The Magic. That title alone tells you a lot about the kind of concert film you’re getting. If this isn’t pure, concentrated Barbra, it’s damned close.
The first image we see in the film is Barbra on her private plane with husband James Brolin, flying into Miami for the show. She then strides through backstage, where we see that for even a meager 13-city tour, Barbra has arranged for an ice cream truck to be parked backstage, offering such artisanal flavors as “pumpkin pie” and “carrot cake” (ew). Shades of the frozen yogurt shop she has in the basement mall of her Malibu home? We’re already off to a roaring start.
The camp appeal of Barbra Streisand isn’t that she’s pitiable or in any way pathetic. It’s in watching a Hollywood star so completely in control of her own image and environment that nothing penetrates it … and nothing has for decades. She stands in the middle of the stage, next to an end table upon which has been placed a vase with two pink roses and a teapot. Does she partake of tea at any point in the show? Not that we see. She just wants it there. Her stage banter is packed with good-natured grandma jokes about the changing times. At various points in the show, she delivers prepared punchlines about Twitter, Uber, and texting. She jokes that in her day, “the only people who had cell numbers were in jail.” Cell phones have been around for over 25 years! Could it be that we were all so simple then?
Which: right! The music! It’s a murderer’s row of greatest Streisand hits, kicking off with “The Way We Were” and moving through her classics from A Star Is Born and her Broadway work (two Sondheim ballads, though “Being Alive” gets an oddly jazzy rendition). Some of the songs we know best as duets (“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”) sound strange with Barbra alone, and “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” should probably stay packed away now that Donna Summer’s not around to deliver it. Streisand’s voice isn’t entirely what it once was; she’s not effortlessly blowing the barn doors out on every number. But by the time the show ramps up to “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “People” (talk about playing the hits; you’ve never seen an audience lose their minds to anything like these people do to any and all mentions of Yentl), her instrument shows itself to be in fine form.
But it’s that stage banter — usually just with herself — that provides the most reliable entertainment value. Streisand long ago perfected the stage-banter-seamlessly-into-first-line-of-song technique, to the point where it feels like she’s doing a parody of herself. But it’s just classic Barbra. But then she’ll bring Jamie Foxx onstage to do “Climb Every Mountain” (I’m saying!), and watching Jamie Foxx do pre-scripted, Streisand-style banter just so he can jump into the song mid-sentence is like watching a cat attempt to ride a unicycle.
Streisand’s self-mythologizing is really on-point here, with a kind of humble-bragging style that eventually sloughs off the “humble” like a particularly burdensome backpack. One story finds time to mention her “ten #1 albums across six decades,” and when the audience (rightly) applauds, Barbra tells them she didn’t say that to get applause with the kind of conviction to a cover story most foreign spies would envy. The section where Barbra goes through her career as a film director — a natural fit for any stage concert — is a true gem. Over photos of her behind various cameras on the set of films like Nuts (“Interesting movie, wasn’t it?”) and The Prince of Tides (audience member: “YOU SHOULDA GOT AN OSCAR!”), Barbra reminds us all she’s a multi-threat talent. And then she performs “Papa Can You Hear Me” from Yentl amid an audio-visual lightning storm, and it’s honestly phenomenal.
Streisand ends the show with roughly twelve encores, which on the surface sounds self-indulgent, but when you think about what her fans likely shelled out for that concert, and how a star of Streisand’s stature could have gotten away with the bare minimum, those encores (and the lightning storm; and Jamie Foxx) look more and more like the hard work of a dedicated entertainer. Also, be sure to stick around through the end credits, and not just for the stone crabs. Particularly if you are a fan of Kathy Griffin’s classic stand-up routines, there is a tag at the very end that will be delightfully familiar.
It’s a particular ride we’re all on with Barbra, but we can’t say we didn’t know exactly what we were getting into. Nor that we were in any way disappointed. Fire this one up while you’re nursing your pumpkin pie hangover. It — much like the crab shack in Miami that Barbra phones* during intermission — really delivers.
*if you honestly believe Barbra Streisand places her own calls for take-out … well, I won’t rain on your parade
Stream Barbra: The Music... The Mem'ries... The Magic on Netflix