Television: Flip-Side Streisand

TELEVISION Flip-Side Streisand

It was Barbra Streisand's second television special, and the publicity buildup made it sound like the Second Coming. "The most electrifying entertainer in the world," pealed a CBS advertisement on air day last week, "has a new hit on her hands . . . even more exciting than the first." The morning after, many a critic looped ecstatically through the hoop. Color Me Barbra, the show was called, and one reviewer exclaimed, "Color her magnificent." "She is the only younger superstar around," cried another. "The show of this year," declared a third. Yet for all the press raves and the excessive bravos of the studio audience, last week's Barbra was, at best, flip-side Streisand. The addition of color was Color Me Barbra's single improvement over the original. Otherwise the show was over-cute, overwrought and suffocatingly overproduced.

Last season, in her showstopper, Barbra was given the run of Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman. This time, for an opener and attempted topper, she gawked girlishly through the hallowed marble halls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, singing as a Modigliani lady, now a latter-day Nefertiti, now Marie Antoinette. Later, she serenaded her poodle in French (with subtitles), tromped like a kangaroo on a trampoline, played Tarzan on a trapeze, juxtaposed noses with an anteater and hoofed with a squad of penguins.

If anything, the show proved that one full hour of Streisand's peculiarly nasal voice is about 45 minutes too much, and that her choice of songs—Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long; Animal Crackers in My Soup—can be appalling. The Streisand talent is considerable, but it is getting lost in a myth.