Fifty years ago tonight, a unusual-looking, unknown kid rolled out onto a Broadway stage on the casters of her secretary's chair and sailed straight into pop-culture immortality. The show was I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and the kid was Barbra Streisand. Most in the audience that night assumed her name to be misspelled in their Playbills. That her name was there at all was only because director Arthur Laurents was taking a chance that the largely inexperienced 19-year-old, in a showy supporting part, might make up for a flawed book with her big voice and even bigger stage presence.
Two years earlier, Streisand had arrived in Manhattan penniless and without connections. But she'd known exactly how to get what she wanted. The Legend, as it's come down to us over the past half a century, has always insisted that Streisand's triumphs were fated and unrehearsed. But from the moment he first saw her at auditions, Laurents pegged what he called Streisand's "calculated spontaneity." She knew exactly what she was doing. She threw off a glamorous old fur coat to reveal a plain wool dress underneath, hardly the high couture most aspiring actresses chose for auditions. Her hair wasn't coiffed either, but instead knotted in an old-maidish bun. "Spinster Incarnate," Laurents thought, which was precisely what he needed for the role of the harried secretary, Miss Marmelstein.
Even more shtick was to come: Streisand's sheet music, taped together and held comically to her waist, suddenly accordioned after her as she bolted onto stage. "A good trick," Laurents admitted, especially since it was punctuated by a "trilling giggle of feigned surprise." But he felt she was "trying too hard." Indeed, when it came time for her to sing, Streisand conspicuously plucked the chewing gum out of her mouth and, using a bit of business she'd perfected in her nightclub act, impudently stuck it under the chair. Laurents rolled his eyes. "She'd better have a voice," he thought to himself.
She did.
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