Word: streisands
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...Barbra Streisand is not happy. Here she is, a pop superstar revered by millions, newly embarked on her first paid concert tour in 28 years. Yet all she hears is complaints...
Take those ticket prices. With a top fee of $350 a seat, the Streisand show (which begins its five-city U.S. swing this week in Washington) far surpasses even the priciest predecessors in the can-you-top-this field of concert extravaganzas. But Streisand doesn't see a problem. "I think this price is fair," she says. "If you amortize the money over 28 years, it's $12.50 a year. So is it worth $12.50 a year to see me sing? To hear me sing live? I'm not going to do it again...
Then there is the TelePrompTer matter. During her show, a video screen hangs high above the audience, displaying not only the lyrics to her songs but most of the patter in between them. Critics who caught her first concerts in London were derisive. Streisand claims that she hardly ever looks at the prompter but needs it to relieve the stage fright that kept her away from live performing since a 1967 free concert in New York City, when she forgot some song lyrics. "I couldn't be doing this ((touring))," she says, "if I didn't have...
...biggest peeve of all is the nosy, mean-spirited press. Usually Streisand tries to avoid reporters. But in a rare interview with TIME last week, she had all the recent slights at her fingertips: a British tabloid that claimed she arrived in London toting her own trash can (it was actually a hatbox); a New York Times op-ed piece criticized the dress she wore at the Inaugural gala; a story in TIME listed some of her alleged tantrums. And when, at a dinner honoring Hillary Clinton, she gave a speech about our society's view of women, nobody covered...
Powerful, complex, frightened -- all might fairly be applied to Streisand. She is the most popular and enduring pop singer of her generation; a filmmaker widely acknowledged to have more clout than any other woman in Hollywood; a political activist with the money to back her beliefs. Yet stories of her rampaging ego, of fights with co-stars and directors, of her obsessive perfectionism, are legion. More recently she has been knocked for being first among Hollywood's Clinton groupies. "On a clear day in Washington," a catty New York Times story put it, "you can see Barbra Streisand forever...