Barbra Is Back! Streisand Launches Her Biggest Tour

03 October (Reuters)

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Six years after declaring she was giving up live performances, Barbra Streisand returns to the stage on Wednesday to launch her first proper concert tour in well over a decade, and the biggest of her career.

It will be only the second national tour by Streisand in the four decades since she became the toast of Broadway, launched a Grammy-winning recording career and won her first Oscar in the 1968 musical "Funny Girl."

Insisting she has conquered the stage fright that made her a virtual stranger to the concert circuit for years, Streisand, 64, says her comeback tour was sparked mostly by her desire to raise money for her favorite charities. The money will be distributed through her own philanthropic foundation.

"That's the main reason I'm going back on the road now," she told Oprah Winfrey's O magazine.

According to one source close to the performer, Streisand plans to give around $10 million in proceeds from her 20-date, 16-city tour to such causes as environmental research, education and health issues.

Last month, she announced that former President Bill Clinton's Climate Change Initiative would be the first recipient, pledging a donation of $1 million.

Streisand also has proven a potent Democratic Party fund-raiser in recent years, helping generate millions through benefit appearances for the White House bids of former Vice President Al Gore and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Still, her latest tour remains a for-profit venture that could gross up to $90 million at the box office, based on the sellout of her opening night at the 16,000-seat Wachovia Center in Philadelphia.

Ticket prices average $275, with individual seats ranging from $100 to $750, said Fran Curtis, a spokeswoman for the tour's promoters.

Live performances by Streisand are rare, and she has many devoted fans, most of whom came of age at the height of her popularity in the 1960s and '70s, when songs like "The Way We Were," "People" and "Evergreen" were hits.

"She's an icon," said Ray Waddell of Billboard magazine. "It's kind of like the Super Bowl of concerts, particularly for her fans. You don't get a lot of chances of see Barbra Streisand live. She doesn't tour very frequently at all, and when she does, it's a limited engagement."

Streisand is America's biggest-selling female recording star of all time, with a U.S. sales tally of 71 million albums, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Her latest release, last year's "Guilty Pleasures," became her 50th gold-certified album.

Winning an Academy Award for her 1968 film debut as Fanny Brice in the musical "Funny Girl" (she tied the Oscar vote for best actress that year with Katharine Hepburn in "The Lion in Winter"), Streisand also has a raft of Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards to her credit. Yet her career as a live performer to date spans only about 70 concerts.

Her last real tour in 1993-94 sold out 22 dates with ticket prices as high as $350. It grossed nearly $60 million and was widely credited with shattering the glass ceiling on concert prices, according to Billboard.

A set of four concerts in September 2000, billed as her farewell to live performing, grossed $27 million. She said then that she wanted to spend more time with her actor-husband James Brolin, whom she married in 1998.

Curtis said promoters were happy with sales for Streisand's latest tour and a number of venues had sold out.

But Gary Bongiovanni, editor of concert trade publication Pollstar, said sales were not at the fever pitch they had been in the past.

"It could be that her core fans who looked at her tour in '94 and again in 2000 as ... the chance of a lifetime to see her have opened their wallets and done it once and aren't as ready to do it again," he said.

Streisand will be joined on her comeback tour by the classical-pop vocal quartet Il Divo, who will perform separately as well as provide backing vocals on some numbers, though Streisand has stressed she will open the shows herself.

She also has said the upcoming concerts, while being held in arena-size venues, would feature less elaborate staging than in the past. She will be accompanied by a 58-piece orchestra for shows that blend her best-known hits with songs she has never performed in public.