The 2012 Tour
In the Fall of 2012, Barbra Streisand embarked on her fourth North American concert tour since 1994. The new live show, presented by concert promoters Live Nation and S2BN, reunited her with co-director Richard Jay-Alexander and music director William Ross. Backed by a 58-piece orchestra and a 60- to 80-piece guest choir in each city, Streisand was also joined on this tour by Il Volo—a trio of Italian operatic pop teenage singers: tenors Piero Barone and Ignazio Boschetto, and baritone Gianluca Ginoble; trumpeter Chris Botti and violinist Caroline Campbell; and Streisand's son—and singer!—Jason Gould. After the Brooklyn shows, Streisand's sister Roslyn Kind joined the tour and sang in the second act.
Streisand and her concert team worked at Grandma's House—the guest house and work place at her homestead in Malibu, California—during the months of July and August 2012, putting the show together. In the last week of September 2012, the company moved into The Liacouras Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA where the stage was erected and the orchestra rehearsed.
Jeremy Railton designed Streisand’s stage in 2006 and repeated the design in 2012. “We decided to go for visual simplicity to deliver the best experience for Ms. Streisand without overpowering her,” he said. “The intent of my set design was to support perfect sound. We brought Barbra up in the middle of the orchestra where she could be surrounded by her musicians. Ultimately, the stage became a series of ramps surrounding a sunken orchestra. I put small Juliet stages on all sides, creating intimate visiting spots with a table, a vase of flowers and a pot of tea which allowed for each side of the audience to receive a visit from our beloved Diva!”
Tait Technologies built Streisand’s stage. Adam Davis of Tait said, “From a build standpoint, this show was quite different than anything that we’ve done for Barbra Streisand in the past, as we fully-integrated our patented MagDeck system into the show [...] With the design based around incorporating the orchestra pit, it’s always complicated when you have to fit nearly 60 musicians and their instruments into a defined area.”
For the first three shows of this tour, a full “Austrian surround” encased the stage. When the audience entered, they saw an enormous 360-degree Kabuki curtain. The concert began with a Streisand vocal of “You’ll Never Know” accompanied by a three-minute career history projected upon the screen. As the orchestra began playing the Funny Girl overture, the curtain dropped and Streisand made her entrance center stage.
After Brooklyn, the tour utilized a single screen that hung center stage; no more Kabuki curtain.
Because Streisand was booked for the newly built Barclays Center, a 19,000-seat sports and entertainment venue in Brooklyn, New York where she was born and raised.
“When I first thought about building an arena in Brooklyn, I always envisioned Barbra Streisand coming home to take center-stage in her native borough,” said Barclays Center owner and developer Bruce Ratner. “It's humbling and almost surreal to welcome arguably the greatest entertainer of all-time to Barclays Center. Barbra is Brooklyn and there's nowhere more fitting for her to perform. This will be a night to remember.”
The show (and subsequent television special/DVD) was named Back to Brooklyn. At Barbra's other tour cities, the show was simply called Barbra Live.
Tickets to see Streisand’s 2012 tour ranged in price from $90 to $150 to $650, depending on the venue (some were less expensive).
Richard Jay-Alexander and Streisand structured the show similarly for each city: Streisand came out and sang a handful of songs; she welcomed Il Volo by singing a duet with them; Il Volo sang a couple of songs without Streisand; Streisand returned to pay tribute to Marvin Hamlisch and wrap up the first act with songs from Gypsy. In act two, Streisand's guests, Chris Botti, Jason Gould, and Roslyn Kind joined her for various duets. The whole show climaxed with a choir singing Leonard Bernstein. Then Streisand sang us out of the auditorium with a couple of songs.
They also reused the “Ask Barbra” segment from the 2006 tour, and Streisand used the opportunity for some comedy and to sing “snippets” from her more popular songs.
After the tour moved on from Brooklyn, fans were treated to two videos on the big screens during intermission: first, a short video from the Streisand Foundation about the work they do addressing women’s heart disease, and then the video for Duck Sauce’s disco hit, “Barbra Streisand.”
Lighting director Peter Morse joined Streisand and crew for this tour again. He told LiveDesignOnline.com: “We wanted Barbra’s old nightclub feel, a very intimate lighting style with a steep angle, supplemented with incandescent footlights and a filler glow from some of the house spots that helped to compensate for the steep keylight angle,” said Morse. “This works especially well when she is on a stool singing a song, and she holds that last note for a long time, allowing for an iris up to the face, as in the intimate nightclub environment. Nightclub or arena, she’s still got it.”
“No two songs look alike, which is a challenge if we get a new song for the evening,” Morse noted. “The set list has alternates, and I light the alternates with similar looks to the original but cue them differently. Sometimes the alternate comes in right after the original, but the audience is really there to see Barbra and not the lighting. I am there to light the elements and complement the vision, as grandly as possible, without distracting from Barbra. She is, after all, the focus.”
“I’ve dressed Barbra for as long as I can remember,” Donna Karan wrote on her Tumblr page. She said that “because this Brooklyn concert was so special and personal to Barbra, it was important the clothes have that ‘wow factor.’ We collaborated for weeks and weeks – since the summer, actually. And we both loved the results.”
Karan and Streisand designed three looks for the shows.
For the first act, Streisand took the stage wearing a black sequined outfit. “Nothing catches the lights better than sequins,” Donna Karan wrote. “The menswear-inspired jacket she wore came straight from our fall line. The white shirt framed her face and the matching vest underscored the haberdashery feeling. We had the option of pants and a skirt (personally, I loved the sexy, burnout skirt.) I just love Barbra in tailored pieces and this was a knockout on her.”
Barbra’s second look in the first act was a similar pantsuit done in black sequins, too.
“The piece de resistance, however, was the coral dress,” Karan stated. Streisand wore the dress for all of act two. “Talk about wow! The color and detailing was inspired by Barbra’s vintage Art Deco bracelet (which she wore with the dress.) Then came the cape – I mean, can you ask for anything more dramatic than a sweeping coral cape? The effect was breathtaking.”
After all the chaos, stress and hard work that went into these clothes, we were both thrilled. The looks were so amazing, so perfect and so truly Barbra.
IL VOLO
Il Volo (which means “the flight”) is a group of three young men who started on an Italian T.V. show like America’s American Idol. A producer named Tony Renis put the singers together and signed them to Geffen Records. The group is: Piero Barone, Ignazio Boschetto and Gianluca Ginoble.
“To perform with Barbra Streisand, particularly in her hometown of Brooklyn was something we'll never forget," Barone said during a telephone interview from Vancouver, BC. "Every night we were out with her I had goose bumps. It was an extraordinary experience. What I learned from her was to keep it humble since she has accomplished more than anyone and she is so humble. We'll be humble too.”
“She's the best. She does everything perfectly,” said Boschetto in 2015. “She sang perfectly, performs perfectly, she's a legend.”
CHRIS BOTTI
Botti is a world-renowned trumpeter who tours the world with his music. Streisand had always wanted to work with him, so it was advantageous when he was able to join her concert tour.
Botti explained: “Oddly enough, the trumpet leans up against the voice really beautifully, because you can play underneath …. if it was another voice up against her, then you’ve got to navigate room… but I could just play right underneath her or over on top of her, around her, stuff like that, and it worked so perfectly that way.”
During the 2012 tour, Botti performed two songs without Barbra, including the classical theme “Emmanuel” by Michel Colombier with violinist Caroline Campbell.
JASON GOULD
Jason worked with his mother before when he was cast as Bernard Woodruff in the 1991 film The Prince of Tides. But Streisand had no idea her son could sing! She told Katie Couric: “You know I used to sing with him when he was a baby. When I came home from work, we would sing together. And then when he was 15, I heard this gorgeous hum from behind his door. And I went, ‘Jason, is that you?’ [Son’s Response] ‘Mom go away.’ [Barbra] ‘Open the door, Jason.’ [Son’s Response] ‘Mom, no it’s OK.’ But I heard him hum, right? And a few years ago he said, ‘You know I’ve started to sing and work on some music,’ and I said, ‘Really?’ And this is a tough spot to enter that profession for him, I suppose. And I tell you, when I heard the things he’s recorded, the musicianship, the sound of his voice, it’s like he has a little chamber music orchestra right in his vocal chords. I don’t know what it is. His sweetness, his inventiveness musically. I said, ‘Jason, I have to sing with you. You have to be on my duets album.’ Not only that, ‘You have to come.’ He’s never performed live.”
“Jason will be on the entire tour with us,” Richard Jay-Alexander told USA Today. “He has his mother's mellifluousness, and like her, he never sings a song the same way twice. She's wildly proud of him.”
Gould said touring with Streisand “was pretty wild actually, in that I had basically never sang in front of a live audience, let alone an audience of 18,000 people. So to do that took a lot of prayers because I didn't know what that would feel like. It was a sweet experience really, and my mother was very supportive and encouraging. It was her idea.”
Jason sang a duet with his mother during the tour and was also given a solo spot in which he sang “This Masquerade.”
ROSLYN KIND
Roslyn has been performing since she was a teenager, singing on The Ed Sullivan Show and releasing her first album, This is Roslyn Kind in 1969. She appeared on and off Broadway, and has been a guest star on many television programs, including a singing cameo on The Nanny with Fran Drescher. As a singer, Roslyn has performed at theaters and clubs around the world like Lincoln Center, The Greek Theater and London's Cafe Royal.
“With everything I have done in my career, the high point of my career, to me, is being on stage with my sister and having our family on stage together and traveling together as a family,” Kind told the press in 2013.
Billboard’s Boxscores reported Streisand’s ticket revenue on November 14, 2012:
Oct. 8 — Nov. 11
$31,329,222 —
total box office take for these dates
123,111 — total number of tickets/fans sold to
Barbra’s Brooklyn show totals were reported the next week, 11/27/12:
Oct. 11 — 13
$9,327,948 —
total box office take for Brooklyn, Barclays
31,176 —
total number of tickets/fans sold to
In December 2012, Billboard ranked touring artists by gross, compiled from Billboard Boxscores reported from Nov. 9, 2011, to Nov. 13, 2012.
Streisand came in at #12, with the following numbers:
Total Gross:
$40,657,170 Number of Shows:
12
Total Attendance: 154,287 Number of Sell-Outs:
12
End / 2012 North American Concert Tour – Main Page
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