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The Blue Angel The Blue Angel, named after the Marlene Dietrich film, was a classy New York nightclub with a red carpet at its entrance. The back room, where Barbra and other entertainers performed, was long and narrow and pink. The stage was lit by a single spotlight. After closing the off-Broadway review Another Evening with Harry Stoones, Barbra went to work at The Blue Angel. She added Peter Matz's "Gotta Move" to her repertoire there and proved that she could pull off a "chic" nightclub act, although she still sang weird novelty songs (like Cole Porter's "Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking" -— also added to her act during The Blue Angel engagement.) Arthur Laurents, Harold Rome and Jerome Weidman (the director, composer, and writer of I Can Get It for You Wholesale) saw Barbra at the Blue Angel. Her performance there, as well as her audition for them, helped win her the role of Miss Marmelstein in Wholesale — her first Broadway musical. Barbra would perform midnight shows at the Blue Angel, after her Wholesale performance. In 1995, Laurents said, "I helped her with her nightclub act at the Blue Angel, and I brought Steve Sondheim to hear her. He didn’t like her voice at all. And she didn’t like his music. Now you couldn’t get a piece of paper between the two of them, they’re so close." Columbia Records' A&R (Artists and Repertoire) director David Kapralik, who saw Streisand almost every night, convinced his boss, Goddard Lieberson (President of Columbia Records) to catch Barbra's act. Seeing Barbra live in front of an adoring audience helped convince Lieberson to finally sign her to Columbia Records in October 1962. Read a review of Barbra's 1962 Blue Angel show >>
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Sometime in 1961, in an attempt to secure a recording contract, Barbra recorded a 10-inch 45 rpm acetate demo at Fine Recording Inc., which was located at 118 West 57th Street, New York. On one side was "Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair," and the flip side, "Come to the Supermarket (in Old Peking)". Barbra is accompanied on the demo by a piano and you can hear some banter by the accompanist. |
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NEW FACES [Time Magazine, Jan. 25, 1963 courtesy of Richard Kleinberg]
She Knows What She Means When Barbra Streisand talks, she gets lost in the trackless deserts of her burgeoning vocabulary. "Creativity is like a part of perversion," she will begin, "like a thing that goes inward for emotion, not responsively, because intellect is bad for what I do." Such thoughts always brig her to a helpless "Know what I mean?" And no one ever does. But when she sings, everyone knows exactly what she means; even with a banal song, she can hush a room as if she really had something worth saying. Last week at Manhattan's Blue Angel, she cast timid eyes at the ceiling as if Major Bowes's cane were about to rip down from the attic. She squirmed onto a stool and let her coltish legs dangle, ankles flapping. She twisted bony fingers through her hair and blessed her audience with a tired smile. Then she sang — and at the first note, her voice erased all the gawkiness of her presence onstage. Only 20 and a singer for barely three years, Barbra seldom hits a note on pitch but she slides into tune with such grace that her quavers often sound intended. Much as she denies learning from other singers, her style is unmistakably Lena Horne's, and she makes superb use of it. She closes her show with a slow version of Happy Days Are Here Again that lends the song an ambivalent sorrow only a very wise girl could dream up. Born in Brooklyn, she did not make her first trip to Manhattan until she was 14. She had only a few hours of nightclub singing behind her when she was cast in a part on Broadway in last year's I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She stold the show with a number called Miss Marmelstein, and has been intent on musical comedy ever since. "I don't think about space and the nuclear thing," she says, starting off on another trip into the unknown. "I don't want to cut off the emotion because I just know the sensory things. I deal in the senses — know what I mean?"
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Barbra Streisand, caught recently at New York's Blue Angel, is one of those petite, young (20) creatures whose voice, style and general demeanor belie their appearance. She displayed a Valkyrie-sized set of vocal cords and a tightly-controlled delivery that ranged from meekly childlike to wantonly worldly. Arriving almost breathless from her smash performance as Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It For You Wholesale, Barbra immediately set up lighthearted housekeeping with a way-out, upbeat-nik ballad from The Fantasticks that began, "I'd like to swim in an ice cold stream..." and after about six bars, every warm-blooded male in the house was ready to join her. Barbra, who first won fame as a comedienne, can be legitimately claimed as a singer of note; her "Cry Me A River" proved that. She could be plaintive (on the oddly-fashioned "I Hate Music, But I Like To Sing") or hilarious as she told why she was in love with Harold Monget ("Not because he has a car...Arnie Fleisher has a car..."). The rest of her turn featured semi-abstract airs, ebullient ditties and verdant evergreens all in a row. A melodic musician, Miss Streisand deftly turned the Blue Angel into a Barbra-shop. Catch her soon and you'll have a cocktail-party ploy of being able to say you knew her when.
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copyright © 2003-2008 Matt Howe |
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