Reviews

With even the cheap seats costing the best part of a ton, she was going to have to produce something special to deserve such a tariff.

Barbra Streisand (pic: Shirlaine Forrest

That special never came. The truth is that from her hideously ham-fisted and scripted ad-libs to her fantastically plain stage, the only justification on offer for the ticket price was to pay for the stunning diamond necklace that sparkled round her neck.

Even her songs couldn’t help her. Sure, she stuck to crowd-pleasers, wandering through Funny Girl’s Broadway and silver screen tunes, and poring over The Way We Were and Evergreen, but on close examination, away from the recording studio and the film set, her smoky, silky voice has obvious limitations, grasping for the higher notes and breaking over the crescendos.

Yet that could have been forgiven if she’d put her heart and soul into the set. Sadly, what she actually supplied was a series of stop-start set-pieces, punctuated by a needless interval and the arrival of four cardboard-acting Broadway hunks, whose dual purpose seemed to be to distract the audience from Barbra’s work-shy performance and hammer home her career achievements to a crowd that already knew them by heart.

Barbra Streisand (pic: Shirlaine Forrest

But then, could we have expected anything different? Streisand has been a superstar so long that her reality is a warped one, where it is caring to have your PA call up your destination on the Internet and simply mark down what they see the most important local points.

Shockingly, this seems to be exactly what happened, as she treated the audience to a patronising rundown of eating fish and chips, sampling black pudding and Manchester tarts, and, most bizarrely, visiting Fletcher Moss Botanical Gardens, all read straight from the biggest auto-cue the arena’s ever seen, hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

Is such fakery understandable or unforgivable? Had this been Las Vegas, where shows like this are surrounded by the never-ending heat of the deserts and the unreality of the shining, spinning casinos, it may have made sense, but it wasn’t.

It was Manchester on a Tuesday night in the middle of a non-starting summer and rather than the much-vaunted superstar, the woman on stage was nothing more than a glorious rip-off.