One Night at the Village Vanguard, filmed on the night of September 27, 2009, was arranged to celebrate the release of Barbra Streisand's newest album Love Is the Answer. Streisand sings a combination of tunes from that record (“In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “The Gentle Rain,” “Some Other Time”) as well as some of her longtime favorites (“Evergreen,” “The Way We Were.”)

The location, the Village Vanguard, is a club in Greenwich Village where Barbra sang as a teenager. The roughly 130 audience members are composed of Streisand’s close personal friends and colleagues, including Lorraine Gordon, widow of Village Vanguard founder Max Gordon; Streisand’s manager Marty Erlichman; and Rick Edelstein, the waiter who arranged Barbra’s first audition at the Vanguard. Other celebrities in the audience include Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Donna Karan and others.

Streisand is accompanied by a quartet that features Tamir Hendelman on piano, Jeff Carney playing bass, Brian Koonin on guitar and Ray Marchica playing drums.

It’s widely known that Barbra Streisand avoided live performance for nearly three decades due to a debilitating case of stage fright. In an interview one time, she traced this phobia back to a concert in New York’s Central Park in 1967, when she forgot her lines in the middle of a song. She described the experience as “staggering.” She returned to the stage in the ‘90s, but still there’s not much film footage of her performances throughout all these years—so this is a rare treat indeed.

witf is proud to offer Barbra Streisand – One Night Only at the Village Vanguard as part of its August fundraising campaign on Tuesday, August 9 at 8 p.m.

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