A Happening in Central Park (1968)
A Happening in Central Park was performed and taped by video cameras on Saturday, June 17, 1967. The concert, sponsored by Rheingold Beer, and free to the public, was held in the Sheep Meadow section of New York City's Central Park. Barbra's television sponsor, Monsanto, captured the event on videotape for airing on CBS at a later date.
(Photo, above): Streisand wore a cape made up of two layers of pleated chiffon panels of varying shades of green and pink. The full length cape was worn over the shoulders of Barbra's gown on stage. Designed by Irene Sharaff, who did Streisand's costumes for Funny Girl, the cape sold for $4080.00 in 2004 at Barbra's costume auction.
Barbra took a weekend off from the filming of Funny Girl to perform the concert. On Friday night, June 16th, Barbra and crew rehearsed until very late. Many photos of Barbra in which she wears a headband were taken the evening of the dress rehearsal. The cover of Barbra's A Christmas Album is actually a photo from the Friday Night dress rehearsal in Central Park. On that evening she tried on different gowns and worked with hairdresser Fred Glaser on alternate hairstyles. Director Robert Scheerer also worked out some of his camera blocking at the rehearsal. He utilized seven color video cameras for the concert.
(Photo, left): Barbra and her sister Roslyn examine the grounds of Central Park, which were probably a little muddy, before the concert.
Sound engineer Phil Ramone (who has gone on to become a Grammy Award-winning music producer for some of the biggest talents in the music industry) told The Barbra Archives about his work on the Central Park concert, including how his sound cables got cut the day before:
We had to share the microphones between the record company’s truck and our independent truck. A spotlight was brought in, and when they lowered the back elevator off the truck that was carrying it, it cut right through the cables. You’ve never seen so many engineers with soldering guns … Not just the P.A. system was in jeopardy, but the recording system was jeopardized. About 5 o’clock that afternoon, the day of the concert, we finally got most of the cables back."
To make matters worse, it rained on the day of the concert.
“I mean, it absolutely poured rain that day,” Phil Ramone remembered. “So we never had a sound check with her or her band. The orchestra said, 'We can’t come out there with our violins and beautiful oboes. It’s too damp.' Around 5:30 or 6:00 they finally agreed. It had just started to dry up.”
When Barbra appeared on stage that afternoon, the fans, who had made picnics and come early to get a good seat, went wild.
The stage, designed by Tom John, was very contemporary yet simple. The Plexiglass stairs made it look as if Barbra was walking on air. A 200-foot track was built in front of the stage that extended into the audience. You can see the camera on a crane during wide shots of the concert. The track was to be utilized for the final number, “Happy Days.”
The concert began late, around 9:45 p.m. Conductor Mort Lindsey, wearing a set of earphones, received his prompt. Baton in hand, he cued the orchestra to begin the overture.
Barbra walked down the Plexiglass stage and spread her arms wide to accept the applause of 135,000 fans. Her first song: “Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home.”
An area for Barbra's friends and family was located to the right of the stage. Seated there were husband Elliott Gould, sister Rosyln Kind, Bella Abzug, Mayor Lindsay, Calvin Klein, and Andy Warhol.
The actual, live concert of A Happening in Central Park lasted 2-1/2 hours. Barbra sang some 33 songs—many were not included in the hour-long television special.
(Photo, above): Barbra's set list from "Happening." Thanks to Rich Kleinberg for contributing this rarity! Note: “ Love is Like a Newborn Child” is not listed in Act One, although Barbra sang it that night. It is interesting to look at the order of the songs as they were sung, versus the edited version of the television special in which the song order was sometimes rearranged—especially in the first act.
The Central Park concert was also partly responsible for exacerbating Barbra's well-known stage fright. In 1994, Barbra told Gene Siskel that her stage fright “started in 1967 during the Arab-Israeli War when I was doing my big concert in Central Park. There were 135,000 people there. My movie [Funny Girl] was going to be banned in Egypt. The government had said that [because Omar Sharif] was an Arab and I was a Jew, they weren't going to play any of my movies. So I was afraid that somebody might take a shot at me during the concert. So I started walking around the stage fast. And I forgot my words, which is an actor's nightmare. And that frightened me—that absolute lack of control.”
Barbra forgot the words to the song “Value.” If you look closely you can detect the edit on the TV special. (They cut to a crowd shot to cover it). Conductor Mort Lindsey actually had to call out the forgotten lyric (“A car is just a car”) to Barbra. As she has said in the past about forgetting lyrics, “I was not cute.”
A Happening in Central Park officially debuted on home video (VHS) in 1987. A bootleg videotape released by All Star Video circulated in the 1980s. In 1981 Streisand and All Star made the news when she filed a lawsuit asking for more than $11 million dollars for “an illegal conspiracy to sell unauthorized video recordings of her performances.” The CBS/Fox official version was first released in 1987 in tandem with the home video debut of One Voice. Barbra filmed an introduction to the VHS of A Happening in Central Park. The same introduction was utilized when Central Park finally debuted on DVD in 2005.
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