Barbra Streisand was fourteen years old when she saw her first Broadway play — The Diary of Anne Frank at the Cort Theatre in 1956. Streisand recalled how she felt: “I remember thinking that I could go up on the stage and play any role without any trouble at all,” she said.
A year later, at fifteen, Streisand met Anita and Alan Miller: “the two people who changed my life,” Barbra stated. “I had a job at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village moving sets and painting scenery. Anita was featured in the play; her husband, Alan, was an acting teacher.”
“Barbra was so busy and deep in her plans and dreams for the future, she almost stopped communicating,” her mother, Diana Kind said. “But she kept her promise to stay in school. I was proud when she graduated with a 93 average, after spending her evenings with props, moving scenery and dusting the seats at the theater. I knew now that Barbra would do what she must do—she wasn’t going to let anything stop her.”
“Purple Dust”
by Sean O'Casey
December 27, 1956—December 1957
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St, New York, NY
Produced by:
Paul Shyre and Noel Behn
Starring:
Kathleen Murray, Peter Falk & Alvin Epstein
(Barbra Streisand: Understudy and Assistant Stage Manager)
It must have been an exciting time for young Barbra Streisand. Her first job at a Manhattan theater was working at Cherry Lane on their big hit, “Purple Dust, a “comic pastoral” play by Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey. “Purple Dust” ran for 430 performances, longer than any Sean O’Casey play had ever run anywhere, and was written about in all the New York newspapers.
Alan Miller recalled his wife talking to him about Barbra. “Every once in a while, she used to say: ‘You know, there is this young girl backstage, an apprentice. Would you talk to her? She’s really…. Something about her’.”
Anita ended up inviting young Streisand to dinner with the Millers. Alan described fifteen-year-old Streisand as: “Awkward, skinny, dressed like from thrift shop make-up, with long fingernails and this … heat of curiosity just emanated from her.”
On Streisand’s resume from this time, she listed herself as “Assistant Stage Manager” and understudy for the role of “Avril” on “Purple Dust.”
Malden Bridge Playhouse
Route 66 between Chatham & Pittsfield-Albany Road (Route 20)
Malden Bridge, New York
“When Barbra was 15,” Diana Kind related in a 1965 interview about her daughter, “she came home one day and said that for her summer vacation she wanted to go to a camp that had a little theater. She had already applied and given her age as 17 so she could work in the theater. I had a lot of misgivings about letting her go away at such a young age, but she persuaded one of her friends, who also had aspirations to act, to go with her. So, I let her go to the Malden Bridge Playhouse in the Adirondacks, after she promised faithfully, she would be sure to eat well.”
In 1957, Malden Bridge Playhouse was a 200-seat professional summer stock theatre – a place where actors could intern and where several plays were presented in repertory. Malden Bridge audiences attended the plays in an old theatre/barn. The actors who performed in the shows occupied a lodge across the street from the theatre, which also served as a rehearsal hall and costume shop.
“I went to a playhouse upstate with one hundred and fifty dollars my mother gave me. Later I found it was really money my grandfather had left me,” Streisand recalled. “I had a wonderful time at the playhouse,” she said.
Barbra roomed that summer with Ingrid Meighan who remembered Streisand as having “…a wonderful sense of humor and was more of a comic than a serious actor.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Kind called her daughter long-distance regularly to check in on her. When Barbra told her about a good review in the local paper, Mrs. Kind replied, “That’s nice. Are you eating?” To which Barbra replied, casually, “Sure.”
Malden Bridge Playhouse presented eight plays in 1957, its twelfth season as a professional Equity company. From June until late-August 1957, if Streisand was not on stage acting, then she was backstage doing various jobs. The programs from that season credit her as working on “Properties.” Barbra is credited for “Sound” on the play “The Loud Red Patrick.”
Here’s the shows that Barbra acted in …
July 3—14, 1957
By John Patrick
Directed by John Hale
Streisand played a Japanese child in this play about a Captain sent to Americanize a village in Okinawa. She reportedly led a goat across the stage. Barbara is also listed in the program as “Assistant to Mr. Hale,” the director.
July 23—28, 1957
A comedy by William Marchant
Directed by John Hale
Barbra played “Elsa”
In the comedy about four intelligent working women who fear that they are going to be replaced by a computer, Elsa was a secretary (played on Broadway by Joyce Van Patten). Barbra Streisand recalled, “Can’t you just see me at fifteen coming on the stage, sitting down on a desk, swinging my leg and playing sexy?”
Opened August 30, 1957
A drama by William Inge
Directed by Stanley Beck
Barbra played “Millie Owens”
Picnic is Inge’s classic play (and 1955 movie) about a single mother in Kansas with a beautiful older daughter and an intellectual, 16-year-old, tomboy daughter named Millie. It’s a bittersweet melodrama that involves a sexy outsider, Hal, who arrives in the sleepy town and stirs things up.
The local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, noted that this “apprentice play” was performed six times at 8:45 p.m., with three matinee performances August 30-September 1.
Knowing that Streisand went on to capitalize on the “ugly duckling” theme in the movies, it’s interesting that young Streisand was cast as the outsider, Millie, in Picnic. “You’re just saying I’m pretty because you’re my mom,” Millie says in the play. “People we love are always pretty, but people who’re pretty to begin with, everybody loves them.”
Clinton Playhouse
Route 1, Clinton, Connecticut
August 1958
Streisand’s resumé lists the character “Ellie May” in Tobacco Road at the Clinton Playhouse. However, the real story is that Streisand accompanied the Millers to Connecticut to babysit (part of her acting scholarship). “Ellie May” was played by Vicky Acosta, according to one Hartford Courant review (Streisand was not the first young actor who exaggerated her resumé).
It’s serendipitous that some thirty years later, Barbra Streisand began decades of work on a movie about Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White and her lover, the playwright Erskine Caldwell …. who wrote Tobacco Road!
More notably, Clinton, Connecticut was where young Barbra met young Warren Beatty. “I was babysitting for my acting teacher, and it was Warren’s first summer of stock,” Streisand remembered years later. Warren played opposite the Millers (“Anita Cooper” was Mrs. Miller’s stage name at the time) in A Hatful of Rain. “Can you imagine, he asked if I would cue him! That’s the closest I ever got to a casting couch, not that I could get a part! I saw him a month ago. We’re always, ‘I can’t get over it. Here we are. We were both nobodies!’”
Sources used for this page:
End / 1957-1958 Summer Stock
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