Forest Hills Music Festival
Forest Hills
Queens, New York
July 12, 1964
August 8, 1965
(Above: Arial view of the tennis stadium/music venue, circa 1970)
July 12, 1964 Show
Forest Hills, in Queens, New York, is home to the West Side Tennis Club and the Tennis Stadium where the U.S. Open was held for many years. In the summers, the stadium held a music festival. The venue sat 13,000 and was an outdoor arena.
Some of the songs Barbra sang at the July 12, 1964 show were: “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “My Coloring Book,” “Cry Me a River,” “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” “Bewitched” and “When the Sun Comes Out.”
Her New York Times review by John Wilson was glowing:
BARBRA STREISAND took her night off from “Funny Girl,” in which she has been singing to packed houses since it opened in March, to sing to a sell-out audience of 15,000 at the Forest Hills Stadium yesterday. The skies were overcast and winds were swirling through the stadium when Miss Streisand mounted the uncovered stage. She was wearing a filmy creation in purple, blue and green, which blew blithely in the breeze and which she referred to as “this nightgown.”
But the threatening weather and the awesome dimensions of the stadium all seemed to disappear when she began to sing. She might have been in one of the small nightclubs where she got her start—the Bon Soir or the Blue Angel.
For Miss Streisand communicates. She communicates across yards and yards of beautifully manicured grass tennis courts and up through row on endless row of concrete seats.
[...] Much of Miss Streisand’s charm lies in her sense of the ridiculous, which enables her to transcend the mechanical difficulties that inevitably crop up when a person attempts to treat an audience of 15,000 as though it were just a handful in a dark little club. She wrestled with her microphone, climbed in and out of its wires, tried to avoid falling off the stage with an inventive humor that added immeasurably to her performance.
And when she sang, she was—barring one obstinate note that collapsed in her throat—perfection. Miss Streisand can apparently sing anything—the big, belting song, the subtle, underplayed song, the inadvertently or advertently funny song—and sing each song with such a fine sense of individuality that the performance seems definitive.
Most of the songs she sang last night were those she has become associated with through her nightclub performances and records. They included “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “My Coloring Book,” “Cry Me a River,” “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” “Bewitched” and “When the Sun Comes Out.” She might just as well have sung anything else. It would probably have been just as wonderful.
August 8, 1965 Show
One Streisand fan who attended the 1965 concert at Forest Hills remembered, “She was extremely late for the concert, and the audience was actually booing, with the poor warm-up band taking a lot of abuse. When she finally showed up (she said she was so late because of a photo shoot and all the costume changes she had to make for it), she was in such rare form, that she immediately made the entire audience forgive her. Later, she introduced a song she said had never been sung before. The song was ‘All That I Want’ (from her album My Name is Barbra, Two). And then she said it was by the leader of the warm-up band. An unforgettable moment.”
The leader of the warm-up band and composer of “All That I Want” was Neil Wolfe. Subsequently, Columbia Records produced a special tribute album for Barbra Streisand (Piano for Barbra), featuring Neil playing her hits on piano with an accompanying orchestra. In the liner notes of the album, Barbra wrote that Wolfe was “one of the most exciting pianist-composers I have ever met.”
A review in Billboard magazine later in the month mentioned the following songs which were sung at the August 8th show:
- I've Got Plenty of Nothin'
- When the Sun Comes Out
- My Man
- Fine and Dandy
- When in Rome
- Why Did I Chose You?
End.
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