Barbra Streisand tribute exhibition opens at Miami Beach museum

By Ivonne Malaver

Miami, Oct 14 (EFE).- “Hello Gorgeous,” an exhibition honoring the career of acclaimed singer and actress Barbra Streisand, opened Thursday at The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU in Miami Beach.

“She was like a rocket into the stratosphere,” Broadway producer and director Richard Jay-Alexander, one of the hosts for the opening, told Efe.

Jay-Alexander said that he “fell in love” with Streisand when he saw her in the 1968 film “Funny Girl,” the screen version of the Broadway musical in which the then-22-year-old New Yorker burst onto the scene in 1964.

Though turning successful plays into movies is not uncommon, Jay-Alexander pointed out that Streisand is one of just a handful of performers to appear in both the stage and screen versions of a work.

Streisand, 79, is now writing her autobiography with an eye toward publication next year, according to Jay-Alexander, who has worked with the star on various projects for 21 years.

The exhibition, which takes its name from the phrase Streisand utters while looking at herself in a mirror in a scene from “Funny Girl,” includes her 1959 yearbook from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, some of her earliest nightclub contracts, the gown with a sailor top that she wore in first television special, “My Name is Barbra” and the robe from her 1983 film “Yentl.”

Curator Jacqueline Goldstein said that the exhibition was “very timely because it shows the strength of a very strong woman. Her career starting in the 1960s, still going today.”

The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU is only the second institution to host the exhibition, which made its debut at the Temple Emanuel Streicker Center in New York.

“She’s such an award-winning woman,” Goldstein said of Streisand. “She’s got Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globes, Tony Awards, you name it. She has Kennedy Center awards, she’s been given the (presidential) Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honor in the United States).

“Her career is such an inspiration to so many people and it has been and still is today for the new generation to see what they can accomplish,” the curator said. EFE ims/dr