On a clear day you can see Simply Barbra Forever – Crazy Coqs

On a clear day you can see Simply Barbra Forever at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

After two years of postponements due to Covid, Steven Brinberg was finally able to treat us to his new show, On a clear day you can see Simply Barbra Forever, a 51st birthday celebration of the third movie Streisand made, a screen adaptation by Vincente Minnelli, father of Liza, of the only Broadway musical about reincarnation, with music by Burton Lane and book by Alan Jay Lerner.

As Brinberg explains to the audience, the decade of big road show movie musicals, such as the first two Barbra-opuses Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly!, was over by 1970, so A Clear Day had to be cut by 45 minutes, now unfortunately lost forever.

In the expert hands of musical director Nathan Martin, Brinberg started the evening as Simply Barbra by entering from the audience with ‘Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here’, the opening song of the musical, which found her in very good voice despite a slight microphone malfunction, very rare for Crazy Coqs.

Not restricted by the musical being celebrated, a Sondheim tribute followed, ‘Love, I Hear’ from A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, and a vocally perfect and humorous rendition of ‘The Way We Were’.

Coming back to On a Clear Day, Brinberg did justice to two gems, ‘Go to Sleep’ and ‘Love with All the Trimmings’, showing that this performer doesn’t need trimmings himself, with minimalist make-up and a simple wig, to conjure up the legend.

A hilarious rendition of ‘Melinda’, impersonating the voice and actions of the movie’s leading man Yves Montand, was followed by a duet with Martin of ‘Wait Till We’re 65’, a song from the Broadway show that got cut from the movie.

Commenting on the new Broadway revival of Funny Girl, Brinberg couldn’t help but perform ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’, followed up with ‘Till There Was You’, which Streisand never sang, from another classic musical currently playing on Broadway starring Hugh Jackman, with whom Babs once duetted.

Some tongue-in-cheek comments on Lady Gaga and her remake of Streisand’s version of A Star Is Born led on of course to ‘Evergreen’, which Streisand, like Gaga, wrote herself and won an Oscar for!

The guest singer, young Mountview student Joe Pieri, then gave us a rendition of ‘Dressing Them Up’ from Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (craving to be revived!) followed by a duet with Simply Barbra to ‘He Isn’t You’, the best ballad from the score of On a Clear Day.

The 11 o’clock number from the movie, ‘What Did I Have That I Don’t Have’, followed, leading on to an impressive ‘Come Back to Me’ during which Brinberg proved he could give Christina Bianco a run for her money when it comes to switching impersonations on demand from line to line. The inevitable ‘People’ from Funny Girl followed, with two encores, the first ‘Who Can I Turn To?’, an amazing duet with Brinberg managing to imitate both Streisand and Anthony Newley’s voices to perfection.

Appropriately closing with the title song, ‘On a Clear Day’, this show was arguably the funniest – the best – of Brinberg’s that I’ve ever seen. His next will be 80 Girls 80, a Barbra birthday celebration at Studio 54 in New York on 24 April.

Patrick Honoré