The last time Barbra Streisand played a club as small as the one she poked into Saturday night, a subway ride cost 5 cents and President Kennedy sat in the White House.
Saturday night, another former President came to see her play that teeny space – Bill Clinton, along with current Secretary of State Clinton, and their daughter Chelsea.
Though the 97 highly-prized tickets to this free show, held at the Village Vanguard, were meant to go to fan club lottery winners, a clutch of the powerful did manage to find their way in, including Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, and, naturally, the star’s husband, James Brolin.
Streisand staged this miraculously rare appearance to send up a flare about her new CD, “Love Is The Answer,” out Tuesday.
Like the new CD, last night’s 13-song, 80-minute set featured the kind of woozy saloon songs Streisand first crooned nearly half a century ago at nearby clubs like the Bon Soir.
Streisand appeared comfortable and chatty in the tight surroundings.
“This is hysterical,” she said as she mounted the stage. “Are we a box of sardines here or what?”
But once she sang, Streisand couldn’t have taken her mission more seriously.
Not only did the singer go back to the kinds of low-lit standards she crooned in her youth, but she performed them with the sort of spare support she has rarely allowed in the decades since.
As on the “Love Is The Answer” CD, a four-man jazz combo backed her.
Their arrangements provided only the most teasing encouragement to Streisand, allowing her to use the songs as her own, wide platforms.
And use them she did.
Seldom has Streisand applied her actorly skills to songs with such specificity and intelligence.
In the opening “Here’s To Life,” the 67-year-old Streisand brought a lifetime’s worth of experience to her phrasing. She exuded relief, wariness, humor, wonder, and appreciation.
Her “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” nailed every ounce of the song’s sophisticated ache, while she brought the crowd to its feet with her acute take on Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.”
Streisand’s tone sounded as bell-like as ever, and her range skipped the scales with a balletic ease.
She inhabited the songs with complete authority, something she never could have mustered in her youth.
Those people who got to see this fleeting sight certainly could count themselves among life’s luckiest.
