Local Girl Makes Good, Sings

By Stephen Holden

Leave it to Barbra Streisand to turn her own life into a musical fairy tale, one with a resoundingly happy ending. That is the essence of the farewell show Ms. Streisand brought to Madison Square Garden for two sold-out performances on Wednesday evening and last night.

The personal story she tells in songs and anecdotes is a variation on any number of myths in which a lonely gifted child who never knew her father and marries a handsome prince. She also becomes queen of the Hollywood dream factory with her spellbinding voice.

Ms Streisand's show even includes a child version of herself: the gifted young singer Lauren Frost is used to fine dramatic effect playing the singer as an adolescent girl recording "You'll Never Know. '' Ms Streisand eventually chimes in, and the two join voices on "Something's Coming."

Later, in the most effective of several video sequences, Ms Frost and Ms. Streisand rejoin voices with video images (two live and one from the movie ''Yentl'') singing ''Papa, Can You Hear Me?"  The song is the touching climax to Ms Streisand's anecdote about being sent a love letter her father wrote to a woman (not her mother) when he was 19. 

The bulk of the show, which was taped for Home Box Office, is a fairly straightforward career retrospective that carries the singer from that early recording session to nightclubs to Broadway, and finally to Hollywood and a late-blooming romance and marriage to the actor James Brolin. The closer it gets to the present, the more shamelessly sentimental the show becomes. The love songs that accompany Ms Streisand's wedding and happily-ever-after  pictures with Mr. Brolin are pure greeting-card mush. The wonder is that Ms. Streisand's voice can make such sing-songy romantic doggerel sound, if not deep, at least deeply heartfelt. No pop singer invests the word love with such a swooning sense of expectation, voluptuously half-rolling the l, tremulously intoning the o, purring the v, lending the silent e an aura of breathless anticipation. 

The show offers no less than two grand finales. The first finds Ms. Streisand ascending a stairway to the stars after segueing a quiveringly  tender version of the kitsch inspirational anthem "I Believe" with "Somewhere" (from "West Side Story"), dressed up with grand, thumping flourishes. During the second finale, a gorgeously sung sequence of ballads that includes a pensive "Before the Parade Passes By" and ends with a triumphal "People." Ms. Streisand briefly discusses her retirement from live performance but promises to keep making records and films. 

What's most surprising about Ms Streisand's show is the degree to which her personal fulfillment has lightened up her singing. She has always been better in a relaxed, tender mode than in her steely stentorian one. In her recordings, especially her more recent ones, Ms. Streisand's perfectionist drive has tended to eradicate spontaneity in the quest for an inhuman technical perfection. 

Again and again, the singing on Wednesday conveyed a relaxed joy, a playful tenderness that rarely makes it to Ms. Streisand's recordings nowadays. If some of her top notes have disappeared, her middle register has gained in fullness, and the breathless, spinning vibrato she wields like an emotional slingshot is more expressive than ever. 

Among the show's many magical moments, some of the most memorable  were a wistful "The Way We Were," a tender "Something Wonderful," "Alfie," "Send in the Clowns," "Don't Like Goodbyes," and a big, pumping Brazilian-flavored "Come Rain or Come Shine." Only two numbers seriously grated: the frantic disco hit "The Main Event" (Cher does this stuff much better) and a mismatched beyond the-grave video duet with Frank Sinatra on "I've Got a Crush on You." 

Ultimately the concerts reconfirmed Ms. Streisand's status as the last (and possibly the greatest) true believer in the old romantic myths that are vanishing from pop. She's living proof that schoolgirl dreams really do come true, and happy endings aren't just found in fairy tales. But if these are really her last concerts, her happy ending is our loss.