Liza Pulman Sings Streisand – Lyric Theatre and Touring

Liza Pulman Sings Streisand continues at the Lyric Theatre, London on 8 and 15 April 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

What can one say about Barbra Streisand? She has done it all as a singer, actress, film director and recording artist. She belongs to that small group of entertainers who have won all the major awards – the Oscar, the Grammy, the Tony and the Emmy, covering all the bases in film, music, theatre and television. Born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York, she was inspired from an early age by the movie stars she saw at the cinema and on television, and she determined that she was going to be famous.

Even as a little girl she could sing well, an inheritance, perhaps, from her mother who was a semi-professional operatic singer. Eventually she was booked to sing at weddings and summer camps, so that by the age of nine she had auditioned for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Records. At 13 she made a demo tape with her mother’s help. She became fascinated by acting and actors and at High School in Brooklyn she joined a choir, singing with another chorus member, Neil Diamond – shades of things to come?

Eventually Streisand appeared on stage in minor roles at local theatres and when she returned to high school, she also had an evening job backstage at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. After graduation she had various jobs including usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre during the run of The Sound of Music and then entered a talent contest at a gay nightclub. She won and returned for a residency. Her first professional work was at the Bon Soir club, opening for comedian Phyllis Diller. That was the beginning of Streisand becoming a popular entertainer as singer, raconteur and actress. The rest, more or less, is, as they say, showbusiness history.

Liza Pulman is obviously an enormous fan of Barbra Streisand, in going so far as to present an evening of songs made famous by the now legendary performer. She admits that she in no way does an impression of the singer-actress (c.f. the likes of Jim Bailey and Steven Brinberg) but she does demonstrate the range of the talent of Streisand. That said, however, it’s not hard to detect certain similarities in performance. If you are paying tribute to a great vocalist, then it’s easy to sing the repertoire in a similar fashion. At times there is a hint of the nasal quality that Streisand has, not least during ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ which only Barbra would sing like a torch song rather than the upbeat cheerful ditty that Milton Ager and Jack Yellen wrote in 1929.

The evening begins with ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ from Funny Girl, one of only two stage musicals that Streisand appeared in (she only made Hello, Dolly! on film). The other show was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Harold Rome’s 1962 musical in which Streisand played a secretary called Miss Marmelstein, a small part with but one song, named after the character. She sang it so well that her role was subsequently enlarged to exploit this rising new talent. In the show her boss was played by Elliott Gould who was to be her future husband and father of her son Jason. Streisand was a hit and won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical. After that she could do no wrong.

Pulman reminds us of this important footnote in musical history before moving on to Carole King’s song ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ and giving us ‘Miss Marmelstein’. Referring to Funny Girl, the story of the singer and comedian Fanny Brice, ‘Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long’ is the kind of Brooklyn Jewish song Brice would have sung, together with ‘Secondhand Rose’ and ‘My Man’, which all demonstrate the range of both Streisand and Pulman in tackling both comedy and torch songs.

Pulman is no stranger to different styles of music and song. As a member of Fascinating Aida she is used to writing and performing comic material, she has appeared in Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan and her big wish was to be a blues singer in the 1920s and 30s. This comes through in her performance and, like Streisand, she can handle a soft and sentimental lyric from, say, ‘Evergreen’ (which Streisand wrote with Paul Williams), or Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleeping Bee’ or Marvin Hamlisch’s ‘The Way We Were’ with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and then move on to something silly like ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ or Paul McCartney’s ‘Honey Pie’ with equal aplomb.

In recent years Streisand has tended to oversell her songs, such as on her Broadway albums, belting them out with enormous force, perhaps merely because she can. Pulman shows that it can work on a song like ‘My Man’ or ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’ but a more contemplative approach is just as effective in a song like ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’ or Charles Trenet’s ‘I Wish You Love’.

Pulman is accompanied by six expert musicians, Richard Pardy on saxophone, Steve Walker on trumpet, Andy Taylor-Vebel on guitar, Tom Mark on bass, Dan Day on drums and musical director and arranger Joseph Atkins on piano. I found some of their tempi a little too fast for my personal liking, but there’s no denying their playing talents. One highlight towards the end of the evening is a reminder of the time Streisand was in the Brooklyn high school choir with Neil Diamond. They recorded a duet of the song he wrote with the Bergmans – ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’ with which Pulman nearly closes the show, before ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.

And for an encore…? Well, no Streisand concert would be complete without ‘People’ from Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s Funny Girl, which is kind of where we, or Pulman, came in. No doubt the great lady herself will do the same when she appears live in Hyde Park this summer. In the meantime, catch Liza Pulman Sings Streisand at the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue on 8 and 15 April 2019 and then on tour around the UK.

Michael Darvell