Color Me Barbra

Barbra Streisand shows off her singing talents in this unique special. The first twenty minutes is Barbra in a plain long dress from another century running around the Art Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania years before Rocky climbed those steps. This is her second special and she takes center stage. She sings and changes costumes while looking at the art in the museum. The second part is Barbra with her beloved dog, Sadie. She sings songs for and with the animals more like a zoo than a circus. The animals including a tiger, a kitten, penguins, and more. The final segment is Barbra singing to an audience in color. Well this special is all in color unlike the first one. If there is a complaint, the special is too short.

Following her successful 1965 television special My Name is Barbra, this second show copies the 3 act structure, with some changes. Seeing Streisand in color also allows the conceiver Joe Layton and director Dwight Hemion to legitimise her look in period settings, using her comic skill and vulnerability to present her as a circus clown, and feature a concert of songs performed live to help us further accept her strange face in close-up, as preparation for her movie stardom. It is one of the ironies associated with Streisand that her extraordinary voice eminates from a person with a conventionally ugly face. However, as Funny Girl would attest, talent is beauty.

The 1st act sequence filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art uses a pre-recorded vocal track Yesterdays, a la I'm Late from My Name is Barbra, as a frame for other songs inspired by art work. Streisand is a maid wearing a floor-length apron over black, a curious innocent and canvas for other personas, including a Victorian romantic, Marie Antoinette, a Modigliani-inspired Frenchwoman, and Nefertiti. The transitions are handled smoothly and cleverly, with Streisand's versatile singing voice also allowing for the characterisations. Mention is made of the scale of the cartoon building where Marie Antoinette appears at a balcony, abstract work is copied for Gotta Move, after Non Ca Rien the persona escapes from the painting, and the maid's naughty refusal to enter the nude painting.

In the 2nd act, Streisand has a monologue by Robert Emmett to the audience speaking in French, introducing us to her dog Sadie, and talking about pets, that reads as less disciplined than the monologue from My Name is Barbra, though she is still funny. She is also less outgoing here, perhaps natural because this is not our first view of her, and her reserved voice is a reminder that the loud Fanny Brice from Funny Girl is an act. The monologue is a prelude to her Face medley where she sings to circus animals, dressed in the ruffle and loose clothes of a clown. Streisand is wittily juxtaposed with an anteater, with well behaved animals as the first co-stars she has. She survives the showbiz adage to never work with children or animals, though the penguins who have trouble jumping out from a trough are a worry, and her trampoline flip may involve a stunt double.

The 3rd act is Streisand in concert, dressed in high-waisted white, her short hair as androgynous as the drag queen look she wears in Gotta Move. Peter Matz' orchestra fights her on Where Am I Going, but her best moments are when she looks into the camera in close-up in It Had To Be You and the beginning of Starting Here Starting Now, where we can look back at her constantly fascinating face. The fear she expressed in the concert sequence of My Name is Barbra is replaced by a confidence and perhaps a larger fan-based studio audience, where she reclines to sing C'est Si Bon without affecting the quality of her vocal, and the long shot of her lone figure for the split screen end credits is just as resonant.

Her singing in this special is simply sublime! They'll never be another whose voice has this control, sound, emotion, clarity, etc. This is what belongs in a time capsule!

Follow-up to 1965's "My Name Is Barbra", and shot in brilliant color, "Color Me Barbra" has La Streisand alternating nostalgia, clowning comedy, feminine romantic angst, and beguiling seriousness for a crazy-quilt hour of show-biz razzle dazzle. She's a cut-up and a femme fatale, a sprite and an enigma. With her Egyptian eye make-up and ever-changing hairstyles, she's also a chameleon. Her voice is rich and moving, even if a few of her songs are not ("One Kiss", "Yesterdays"). The circus sequence isn't as intriguing as the museum trip (with the conceit of Barbra becoming the images in the paintings, an idea which works better than you may think). The circus-medley (built around songs featuring the word "face"!) is girlishly cute without ever really becoming enchanting. Still, this is a lively, jazzy special--not quite as emotionally tantalizing as "My Name Is Barbra", but certainly a sterling sophomore effort.

Well, I fear that my review of this special won't heed much different observation than the others before me, but I literally just watched it- during a PBS membership drive- and frankly I'm too excited NOT to say anything. To really appreciate the enigma that is Barbra Streisand, you have to look back before the movies. Before the Broadway phenomenon of the mid-60's. When television was still a young medium, there was a form of entertainment very prominent on the air that is but a memory today: musical variety. Some musical shows were weekly series, but others were single, one-time specials, usually showcasing the special talent of the individual performer. This is where we get the raw, uninhibited first looks at Streisand. She had already been a guest performer on other variety shows including Garry Moore, Ed Sullivan, and scored a major coup in a one-time only tandem appearance with the woman who would pass her the baton of belter extraordinary: Judy Garland. In 1966, COLOR ME BARBRA introduced Barbra Streisand in color (hence the title), but copied the format of her first special a year earlier almost to the letter. In 3 distinct acts, we get an abstract Streisand (in an after-hours art museum looking at and sometimes becoming the works of art), a comic Streisand working an already adoring audience in a studio circus (populated with many fuzzy and furry animals), and best of all, a singing Streisand in mini-concert format just-- well, frankly, just doing it.

It amazes me that she still had the film debut of FUNNY GIRL yet to come, as well as turns as songwriter, director, and political activist. Here, she is barely 24 years old, doing extraordinary things because, as she puts it in her own on-camera introduction, 'we didn't know we couldn't, so we did.' The art museum sequence is shot in Philadelphia over one weekend immediately after the museum closed to the public on Saturday evening, and apparently done with only ONE color camera. Yet there are cuts, dissolves, and tracking shots galore, resulting in one rather spectacular peak moment-- the modern, slightly beatnik-flavored, "Gotta Move." After getting lost amongst the modern abstracts, jazz-club bongos begin, with Streisand emerging in a psychedelic gown and glittering eye makeup, doing the catchy staccato tune with almost androgynous sex appeal. It is not until Act 3, believe it or not, that the moment is matched or bettered by another feat: in the concert sequence, in a white gown and pearl earrings, Streisand recites the torchy "Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home," tearing into the final notes and revealing one of those climactic belts that makes you scream like a little girl even if you're 44 years old...and a guy. Just plain old great television. Check it out.