When booking Streisand’s Philadelphia concert, local sponsor Hal Freeman worked with the New York promoters King and Hyman to find an appropriate venue. “They first wanted Franklin Field, but that was impossible with the track being torn up. We took them to Liberty Bell, Temple and they like Kennedy Stadium best of all.”
Philly’s Sunday Bulletin
newspaper reported: “The local promoters are striving to make the huge [John F. Kennedy Stadium] bowl, home of the Army-Navy football game, more intimate by limiting the seating to 20,000 in the horseshoe-shaped south stands.”
The big news at Barbra Streisand’s August 2nd concert in Philadelphia – the second show in her four-concert tour – was that it was canceled at the last minute (official word came over the car radio at 8:15 p.m.) due to rain.
Producer Walter Hyman told the Philadelphia Daily News, “But we were only trying to do the best we could. We had word from Allentown at 5 o’clock that a storm of an hour’s duration was heading this way and expected to be all clear by show time.”
Streisand came out of her trailer to say hello to the diehard fans who waited in the rain.
The show was postponed until the next evening, August 3rd.
Barbra and sound man Myles Rosenthal had some sound problems in Philadelphia. The Daily News
wrote: “Acoustically, the stadium is not the Academy of Music. The singer couldn’t have picked up more echoes if she gave the concert in the Alps. Other distractions such as feedback on the sound system and the occasional accompaniment by a DC-8 or Boeing jet would have distracted more seasoned veterans, but Barbra takes them as par for the course.”
“Too much echo!” was what the audience yelled. On a bootleg recording, after a plane can be heard during one of Barbra's monologues, she says, disdainfully, “Football stadium...”