Barbra Streisand Prepares To Make Toronto Debut
Posted October 17, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Torontonians have been waiting for decades and finally they have a date with the Funny Girl.
Barbra Streisand makes her Toronto concert debut Tuesday night at the Air Canada Centre. It’s the first of two sold-out Toronto dates.
If Monday night’s Montreal show is any indication, the diva won’t disappoint in her first ever Hogtown show.
Streisand, 64, charmed the Bell Centre crowd with a mix of pop, film and Broadway hits and the backing of an orchestra. Among the songs she performed: The Way We Were, Come Rain or Come Shine, People, and Evergreen.
She also sang a rare original composition, the French tune Ma Premiere Chanson.
Part of the reason Streisand has never played Toronto or Montreal before has to do with the fact that she gave up live performances for nearly 20 years – from 1967 to 1986 – after forgetting the words to three songs at a concert in Central Park.
The singer-actress-director’s 16-city, 20 show tour hasn’t been without its rough spots. At the outset of the tour a thousand bogus tickets were sold online. They were declared invalid because the purchaser bought them with a stolen credit card and then resold them.
And then at Streisand’s Madison Square Garden concert a heckler threatened to upstage a political skit she was performing with a George W. Bush impersonator. The individual wouldn’t stop, and Streisand at one point shouted at him to “Shut the f*** up!”
She added, “Shut up if you can’t take a joke.”
The second A.C.C. show happens Friday.
