STREISAND. Eleventh No. 1 album for the 74-year-old songstress.
Barbra Streisand is in the news again—and not just because of her zany (and stinging) duet with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” where the talk-show host impersonated and poked fun at Donald Trump as he sang “Anything You Can Do” (from “Annie Get Your Gun”) with the legendary songstress.
With the release of her 35th studio album, “Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway,” in which Barbra shares the spotlight with a star-studded lineup of singing partners, the 74-year-old diva flexes her hit-making muscle anew and debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week.
Record-breaking
The record-breaking recording comes 51 years after 1964’s “People,” Streisand’s first chart-topping collection.
In the album, the “insults” are even more “entertaining” when Streisand sings “Anything You Can Do” with the hilarious Melissa McCarthy, who starts trading barbs with Babs when they learn that they’re going after the same role—and after Melissa gets a lecture about how to pronounce Barbra’s last name properly (“Streisand…like sand on the beach, soft s”).
Samples: When Melissa sings, “Any laugh you can get, I can get bigger,” Barbra replies, “I can get any laugh as big as you!” When Barbra says, “You’re a dirty talker,” Melissa comes back with winking smack talk: “Well, you played (the potty-mouthed) Mother Focker!”
At some point, however, Barbra and Melissa end up agreeing that they should be friends, because they’re female role models who far exceeded people’s expectations of them by breaking “Hollywood’s glass ceiling.” But, when the portly comedy queen asked the hard-to-please diva if it was OK to call her Babs, Streisand refused: “Nah…too soon,” she quipped.
Barbra creates scenes that her actor-guests can sink their thespic teeth into: Our top picks are her spot-on collaborations with Anne Hathaway and “Star Wars’” Daisy Ridley (“At the Ballet,” from “A Chorus Line,” for situational comedy) and Patrick Wilson (“Loving You,” from “Passion,” for drama).
Casting call
In “At the Ballet,” Hathaway, Ridley and Streisand are cleverly cast as hopeful auditionees—as the pretty one, the not-so-talented, and the one with the attitude, respectively—who meet at a casting call.
In “Loving You,” Wilson matches Streisand’s soaring high notes and gorgeously rendered low tones as they stirringly dramatize the dilemma of a couple whose relationship is about to end.
Jamie Foxx (“Climb Every Mountain,” from “The Sound of Music”), Hugh Jackman (“Any Moment Now,” from an unproduced version of “Smile”), Antonio Banderas (“Take Me to the World,” from “Evening Primrose”) and Seth MacFarlane (“Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”) also deliver in their respective duets with Streisand.
Alec Baldwin is compromised by a song choice (“The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened,” from “Road Show”) that needs to be beautifully and “lyrically” performed more than character-sung.
Another letdown is Chris Pine, who was exceptional as the narcissistic prince in 2014’s “Into the Woods.”
Here, the dashing actor is weighed down by the inappropriately sonorous and less-than-striking low notes he warbles in the medley of “I’ll Be Seeing You” (from “Right This Way”) and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“My Fair Lady”) that he sings with his superlative singing partner—who sounds sublime, even when the songs she’s singing aren’t!